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An anonymous reader shares a report: Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users' private messages with the app's chatbot exposed, according to an independent security researcher and emails viewed by 404 Media. The exposed chats showed users asked the app "How do I painlessly kill myself," to write suicide notes, "how to make meth," and how to hack various apps. The exposed data was discovered by an independent security researcher who goes by Harry. The issue is a misconfiguration in the app's usage of the mobile app development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an "authenticated" user who can access the app's backend storage where in many instances user data is stored. Harry said that he had access to 300 million messages from more than 25 million users in the exposed database, and that he extracted and analyzed a sample of 60,000 users and a million messages. The database contained user files with a complete history of their chats with the AI, timestamps of those chats, the name they gave the app's chatbot, how they configured the model, and which specific model they used. Chat & Ask AI is a "wrapper" that plugs into various large language models from bigger companies users can choose from, Including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.

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Reduce emissions? Screw that - we have money to lose and memes to generate

Fossil fuel-fired power plant development is roaring back to life in the US thanks to the AI datacenter boom, with data from 2025 suggesting we're reaching the point where the renewable energy transition - and efforts to ease carbon emissions - may well be doomed.…

The Chocolate Factory strikes again, targeting the infrastructure attackers use to stay anonymous

Crims love to make it look like their traffic is actually coming from legit homes and businesses, and they do so by using residential proxy networks. Now, Google says it has "significantly degraded" what it believes is one of the world's largest residential proxy networks.…

eScan lawyers up after Morphisec claimed 'critical supply-chain compromise'

A spat has erupted between antivirus vendor eScan and threat intelligence outfit Morphisec over who spotted an update server incident that disrupted some eScan customers earlier this month.…

Microsoft's Xbox hardware revenue fell 32% in the final quarter of 2025 and overall gaming revenue declined 9% year-over-year, according to the company's latest quarterly earnings, released as part of results showing Microsoft's total revenue exceeded $80 billion. Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, dropped 5%.

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Governors offered atomic megasites and federal cash as hundreds of pages of regulations go missing

The Department of Energy (DOE) is inviting US states to host "Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses" to revitalize atomic power amid reports the agency has weakened safety rules governing the way nuclear sites operate.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Windows 11 now has one billion users. Microsoft hit the milestone during the recent holiday quarter, meaning Windows 11 has managed to reach one billion users faster than Windows 10 did nearly six years ago. "Windows reached a big milestone, 1 billion Windows 11 users," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the company's fiscal Q2, 2026 earnings call. "Up over 45 percent year-over-year." The growth of Windows 11 over the past quarter will be related to Microsoft's end of support for Windows 10, which also helped increase Microsoft's Windows OEM revenues.

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Lennart Poettering's Amutable aims to bring 'cryptographically verifiable integrity' to the other OS

Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kühl and Christian Brauner.…

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.…