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Rising AI power demand is straining grids and pushing operators toward hydrogen, batteries, geothermal, and nuclear

Gartner warns that fossil fuel dominance in on-site power generation is not sustainable, given the rapid rise in datacenter energy consumption due to AI servers.…

Google released Gemini 3 on Tuesday, launching its latest AI model with a breakthrough score of 1501 Elo on the LMArena Leaderboard alongside state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including 91.9% on GPQA Diamond for PhD-level reasoning and 37.5% on Humanity's Last Exam without tool usage. The model is available starting today in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search for Google AI Pro, Google AI Studio, Vertex AI and the newly launched Google Antigravity agentic development platform. Third-party platforms including Cursor, GitHub, JetBrains, Manus, and Replit are also gaining access. Separately, Google said AI Overviews now have 2 billion users every month. Gemini app has topped 650 million users per month.

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Carrier insists network wasn't at fault when smartphone couldn't reach 000

A Sydney resident died after their Samsung handset failed to connect to 000, Australia's primary emergency number, triggering a stark warning from telco TPG that outdated mobile software could be a matter of life or death.…

Users who thought they were safely in the program hit errors on day one

Microsoft has shipped a fix for commercial customers who believed they were enrolled in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program but received error messages on the first Patch Tuesday after support ended.…

Microsoft has rolled out a new preview build for Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channel this week that introduces a new toggle called 'experimental agentic features' that can be enabled or disabled in the Windows Settings app. From a report: According to Microsoft, this new toggle is designed to "allow agents to use new Windows agentic features." The company says the feature will work with AI-powered apps, which "help you automate everyday tasks -- like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails -- so you can spend less time on busy work and more time on what matters most. One powerful way apps are implementing AI today is by interacting with your apps and your files, using vision and advanced reasoning to click, type and scroll like a human would." The setting in the Windows Setting says "When this setting is on, agents can use Windows agentic features." Features such as the recently announced Copilot Actions for Windows feature are going to take advantage of this new experimental agentic feature capability.

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Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI-rival Anthropic announced strategic partnerships today that will scale Claude on Microsoft Azure and bring up to $15 billion in new investment to the AI startup. Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and contract additional capacity up to one gigawatt. Nvidia and Microsoft -- the largest investor in OpenAI -- committed to invest up to $10 billion and up to $5 billion respectively in Anthropic.

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Researchers at the University of Vienna extracted phone numbers for 3.5 billion WhatsApp users by systematically checking every possible number through the messaging service's contact discovery feature. The technique yielded profile photos for 57% of those accounts and profile text for 29 percent. The researchers checked roughly 100 million numbers per hour using WhatsApp's browser-based app. The team warned Meta in April and deleted their data. The company implemented stricter rate-limiting by October to prevent such mass enumeration. Meta called the exposed information "basic publicly available information" and said it found no evidence of malicious exploitation. The vulnerability had been identified before. In 2017, Dutch researcher Loran Kloeze published a blog post detailing the same enumeration technique. Meta responded then that WhatsApp's privacy settings were functioning as designed and denied him a bug bounty reward. The researchers collected 137 million U.S. phone numbers. In India, they found nearly 750 million numbers. They also discovered 2.3 million Chinese numbers and 1.6 million Myanmar numbers, despite WhatsApp being banned in both countries. The researchers analyzed the cryptographic keys and found some accounts used duplicate keys. They speculate this resulted from unauthorized WhatsApp clients rather than a platform flaw.

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European Commission probes whether Amazon and Microsoft wield outsized control under Digital Markets Act

The European Commission has launched investigations into Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services, and plans to review if legislation introduced in 2022 is being applied effectively to the cloud market.…

Lawsuit alleges he poached staff, lifted trade secrets, and set up Red Stapler before quitting

NetApp has accused its former senior vice president and CTO of secretly building a rival cloud control platform while still on its payroll, triggering an urgent legal scramble.…

Every company would be affected if the AI bubble were to burst, the head of Google's parent firm Alphabet has told the BBC. From the report: Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Sundar Pichai said while the growth of artificial intelligence investment had been an "extraordinary moment", there was some "irrationality" in the current AI boom. It comes amid fears in Silicon Valley and beyond of a bubble as the value of AI tech companies has soared in recent months and companies spend big on the burgeoning industry. Asked whether Google would be immune to the impact of the AI bubble bursting, Mr Pichai said the tech giant could weather that potential storm, but also issued a warning. "I think no company is going to be immune, including us," he said. In a wide-ranging exclusive interview at Google's California headquarters, he also addressed energy needs, slowing down climate targets, UK investment, the accuracy of his AI models, and the effect of the AI revolution on jobs.

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Linux inventor also discusses Rust in the kernel, Nvidia's proprietary code, and the problem of AI crawlers

Linux and Git inventor Linus Torvalds discussed AI in software development in an interview earlier this month, describing himself as "fairly positive" about vibe coding, but as a way into computing, not for production coding where it would likely be horrible to maintain.…

Outage leaves users staring at error pages while recovery crawls along

Breaking Internet services provider Cloudflare is suffering a major outage that has knocked chunks of the web offline – including The Register.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Startup Valar Atomics said on Monday that it achieved criticality -- an essential nuclear milestone -- with the help of one of the country's top nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130 million funding round with backing from Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, claims that it is the first nuclear startup to create a critical fission reaction. It's also, more specifically, the first company in a special Department of Energy pilot program aiming to get at least three startups to criticality by July 4 of next year to announce it had achieved this reaction. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive order President Donald Trump signed in May, has upended US regulation of nuclear startups, allowing companies to reach new milestones like criticality at a rapid pace. There's a difference between the type of criticality Valar reached this week -- what's known as cold criticality or zero-power criticality -- and what's needed to actually create nuclear power. Nuclear reactors use heat to create power, but in cold criticality, which is used to test a reactor's design and physics, the reaction isn't strong enough to create enough heat to make power. The reactor that reached criticality this week is not actually Valar's own model, but rather a blend of the startup's fuel and technology with key structural components provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the DOE's research and development laboratories. The combination reactor builds off a separate fuel test performed last year at the laboratory, using fuel similar to what Valar's reactor will use. "Zero power criticality is a reactor's first heartbeat, proof the physics holds," Valar founder Isaiah Taylor said in a statement. "This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering, one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership."

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They can probably set up a printer faster, but look elsewhere for cryptography advice

Gen Z can get off their digital high horses because their passwords are no more secure than their grandparents'.…

Techie wired cryptominers into Nordex's network while company reeled from cyberattack

A Dutch wind farm operator learned the hard way that its turbines weren't just spinning to generate electricity – they were also powering someone else's crypto wallet.…

Chang'e 6's soil sample turns up iron oxides where none were supposed to exist

A Chinese-led team of boffins has uncovered tiny grains of hematite and maghemite in materials scooped from the Moon's far-side South Pole-Aitken Basin by the Chang'e 6 probe – iron oxides more at home on rusty tools on Earth than on our bone-dry satellite.…

€544M Alice Recoque system aims to lift Europe's research horsepower

SC25 France will get its first exascale supercomputer — Europe's second — when Atos subsidiary Eviden builds Alice Recoque using AMD chips.…

An outage at Cloudflare that began moments ago has knocked many popular websites, including ChatGPT and X, according to user reports. Cloudflare says on its website: "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available."

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As Mozilla stumbles into 'AI everywhere,' you might be glad of a non-Google browser engine

Servo is an all-new and all-Rust browser rendering engine. As Mozilla falters, it's the world's best option for avoiding a Google monopoly.…

Cheaper electricity to lure bit barns north as planning fast-track kicks in

While UK households face some of the world's highest energy prices, datacenter operators are set to receive electricity discounts under government plans to accelerate AI infrastructure development.…