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Big Blue leaning on software smarts to modernize COBOL estates and cut costs

IBM's leader has trumpeted an AI-on-the-mainframe future as generative AI fills in the COBOL gap left by earlier generations of techies.…

A Waymo robotaxi struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica on January 23, according to the company. Waymo told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that the child -- whose age and identity are not currently public -- sustained minor injuries. TechCrunch: The NHTSA has opened an investigation into the accident, and Waymo said in a blog post that it "will cooperate fully with them throughout the process." Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at 6 miles per hour, after braking "hard" from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian "suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path," the company said in its blog post. Waymo said its vehicle "immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle." "Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene," Waymo wrote in the post.

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Extortion crew says it's found love in someone else's info as Match Group plays down the impact

ShinyHunters has added a fresh notch to its breach belt, claiming it has pinched more than 10 million records from Match Group, a US firm that owns some of the world's most widely used swipe-based dating platforms.…

Apple sold seven of the ten best-selling smartphones globally in 2025, a lopsided dominance that underscores how thoroughly the company controls the premium end of the mobile market. The iPhone 16 was the single best-selling phone worldwide, and Apple's presence extended all the way down to the tenth spot where the iPhone 16e -- its newest budget-friendly option -- found consistent demand in Japan and the U.S., according to Counterpoint. Samsung accounted for the remaining three positions, led by the Galaxy A16 5G as the best-selling Android device of the year. The Galaxy S25 Ultra also made the cut, marking the second straight year a Samsung flagship cracked the top ten. Together these ten phones from just two companies represented 19% of all smartphones sold during the year, continuing a four-year streak of Apple-Samsung exclusivity at the top.

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Cerner, though acquired in 2022, is nothing to multibillion black hole

Oracle could cut up to 30,000 jobs and sell health tech unit Cerner to ease its AI datacenter financing challenges, investment banker TD Cown has claimed, amid changing sentiment on Big Red's massive build-out plans.…

Android smartphone maker Nothing won't release a Phone 4 this year, the company's founder and chief executive said, and that the 2025 Phone 3 will remain the brand's flagship device throughout 2026. "We're not just going to churn out a new flagship every year for the sake of it, we want every upgrade to feel significant," Carl Pei said in a video. "Just because the rest of the industry does things a certain way it doesn't mean we will do the same."

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Elon thinks taxis and androids will succeed where car sales are stalling

Tesla reported 2025 revenue of $94.8 billion, down 3 percent year-on-year and marking the first annual revenue decline since the electric car maker began publishing financial results in 2010.…

Apply fixes within a few hours or face the music, say the pros

What good is a fix if you don't use it? Experts are urging security teams to patch promptly as vulnerability exploits now account for the majority of intrusions, according to the latest figures.…

Terrible start to 2026 offset by optimistic operating system numbers

Microsoft is famously reticent about operating system usage figures unless it has something to boast about. So CEO Satya Nadella stating that Windows 11 had reached one billion users raised a few eyebrows.…

Zuck bets big on 'personal superintelligence' with $135B splurge

Meta is to nearly double its capital investments aimed at AI this year, spending more on infrastructure than the entire output of some mid-sized economies, as the AI datacenter feeding frenzy shows no sign of ending.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Gatik, a Silicon Valley startup developing self-driving delivery trucks, says its commercial operations are about to scale up dramatically, from fewer than a dozen driverless units running in multiple U.S. states now to hundreds of box trucks by the end of the year. CEO Gautam Narang said it's also booked contracts with retailers worth at least $600 million for its automated fleet. "We have 10 fully driverless, revenue-generating trucks on public roads. Very soon, in the coming weeks, we expect that increase to 60 trucks," he told Forbes. "We expect to end the year with hundreds of driverless trucks -- revenue-generating -- deployed across multiple markets in the U.S." Though the Mountain View, California-based company hasn't raised as much funding as rivals, including Aurora, Kodiak and Canada's Waabi, Gatik said it's actually scaling up faster than any other robot truck developer. Unlike those companies, it focuses on smaller freight delivery vehicles, rather than full-size semis, supplied by truckmaker Isuzu that operate mainly between warehouses and supermarkets and other large stores. The company's focus has been on so-called middle-mile trucking, which, like long-haul routes, has a severe shortage of human drivers, according to Narang. Currently, its trucks are on the road in Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, Nebraska and Ontario, Canada. The company has been generating revenue since shortly after its founding in 2017, hauling loads for customers like Walmart in trucks with human safety drivers at the wheel. Beginning late last year, it began shifting to fully driverless units and is getting more trucks from Isuzu built specifically to incorporate its tech, Narang said. "The hardware that we are using, this is our latest generation, has been designed to enable driver-out across thousands of trucks."

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'What we are finding is that people hate AI'

Interview Vivaldi has raised a middle finger to the influx of AI in the browser space with its latest version.…

Close call after an apparently deliberate attempt to starve a country of energy at the worst time

Cybersecurity experts involved in the cleanup of the cyberattacks on Poland's power network say the consequences could have been lethal.…

150-strong 'surge team' deployed as 8,500 retirees left high and dry, some waiting 9 months for legally owed cash

The UK Cabinet Office is being forced to promise "interim support measures" for struggling retired government workers as Capita's botched takeover of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) lurches from bad to worse.…

Five years after its planned go-live, the system remains incomplete as costs balloon more than sevenfold

Birmingham City Council's SAP-to-Oracle project is set to cost £144.4 million – more than seven times earlier estimates – as it waits for a fully functioning system five years after its planned go-live date.…

It's not your fault

Opinion It's not your fault Amazon hired you for a position that it no longer deems necessary - blame bad planning or unanticipated market conditions. Everybody guesses wrong sometimes, even with the power of the most sophisticated business analysis software and the smartest prognosticators one can hire.…

The jobs that will be eradicated by our AI overlords

The UK government will work with supplier Anthropic to build an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for job seekers, despite its chief executive’s doom-laden views of the job market.…

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: The FBI has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum, a platform used to advertise a wide range of malware and hacking services, and one of the few remaining forums that openly allowed the promotion of ransomware operations. Both the forum's Tor site and its clearnet domain, ramp4u[.]io, now display a seizure notice stating, "The Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized RAMP." While there has been no official announcement by law enforcement regarding this seizure, the domain name servers have now been switched to those used by the FBI when seizing domains. If so, law enforcement now has access to a significant amount of data tied to the forum's users, including email addresses, IP addresses, private messages, and other potentially incriminating information. In a forum post to the XSS hacking forum, one of the alleged former RAMP operators known as "Stallman" confirmed the seizure.

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Happier days at Intel nailed to the wall of discount retailer

Bork!Bork!Bork! Lidl is a well-known purveyor of inexpensive groceries, random goods via the Middle of Lidl, and now… bork.…

Apple TV+ has landed the screen rights to Cosmere, the sprawling literary universe created by Brandon Sanderson. "The first titles being eyed for adaptation are the Mistborn series, for features, and The Stormlight Archive series, for television," reports the Hollywood Reporter. From the report: The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That's a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys. Sanderson's literary success and fan following helped pave the way for such a deal. One of the most prolific and beloved fantasy authors working today, he has sold over 50 million copies of his books worldwide, collectively across his series. [...] While the Cosmere books are set in various worlds and eras, the underlying premise concerns a being named Adolnasium who is killed by a group of conspirators. The being's power is broken into 16 shards, which are then spread out throughout many worlds by the conspirators, spreading many kinds of magic across the universe.

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