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schwit1 writes: Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, tops a ranking that is increasingly dominated by Asia: the world's most populated city. It edged out Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, and Japan's Tokyo to earn the title in a new United Nations report. [PDF] With an estimated population of nearly 42 million residents, Jakarta soared from 33rd place in the previous rankings, in 2018, that were topped by Tokyo. It's followed by Dhaka, with 36 million, which the report says is "expected to become the world's largest city by mid-century."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: CISA has warned that state-backed snoops and cyber-mercenaries are actively abusing commercial spyware to break into Signal and WhatsApp accounts, hijack devices, and quietly rummage through the phones of what the agency calls "high-value" users. In an alert published Monday, the US government's cyber agency said it's tracking multiple miscreants that are using a mix of phishing, bogus QR codes, malicious app impersonation, and, in some cases, full-blown zero-click exploits to compromise messaging apps which most people assume are safe. The agency says the activity it's seeing suggests an increasing focus on "high-value" individuals -- everyone from current and former senior government, military, and political officials to civil society groups across the US, the Middle East, and Europe. In many of the campaigns, attackers delivered spyware first and asked questions later, using the foothold to deploy more payloads and deepen their access.

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Works like a public cloud but keeps everything on-prem

The US Department of Defense on Tuesday awarded Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) a 10-year, $931 million contract to bring cloud conveniences, like unified management and multi-tenancy, to the US military's most sensitive datacenters.…

McKinsey points out the quandary facing companies like CoreWeave

So-called neocloud companies are facing a dilemma: They need to move up the AI stack to avoid being commoditized, but they risk competing against their big hyperscale customers if they do.…

Two coal plants in Mumbai (in India) that were scheduled to close last year continue operating after the state government of Maharashtra reversed shutdown decisions in late 2023 and extended the life of at least one facility by five years. The largest single factor the Indian conglomerate Tata cited in its petition for an extension was increased energy demand from data centers. The Guardian reports that Amazon operated 16 data centers in Mumbai last year. The company's official website lists three "availability zones" for the city. Amazon's Mumbai colocation data centers consumed 624,518 megawatt hours of electricity in 2023. That amount could power over 400,000 Indian households for a year. Residents of Mahul live a few hundred metres from one coal plant. Earlier this year doctors found three tumours in the brain of a resident's 54-year-old mother. Studies show people who live near coal plants are much more likely to develop cancer. By 2030 data centers will consume a third of Mumbai's energy, according to Ankit Saraiya, chief executive of Techno & Electric Engineering. Amazon's colocation data centers in Mumbai bought 41 diesel generators as backup. A report in August by the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy identified diesel generators as a major source of air pollution in the region.

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Hashtag-do-whatever-I-tell-you

Cato Networks says it has discovered a new attack, dubbed "HashJack," that hides malicious prompts after the "#" in legitimate URLs, tricking AI browser assistants into executing them while dodging traditional network and server-side defenses.…

Nvidia pushed back against investor concerns about Google's competitive positioning in AI on Tuesday after the chipmaker's shares tumbled 4.4% and erased nearly $200 billion in market cap on fears that Alphabet's tensor processing units were gaining ground against its dominance in AI computing. The company said it was "delighted by Google's success" but asserted that it continues to supply chips to Google. Nvidia said it remains "a generation ahead of the industry" as the only platform that runs every AI model and operates everywhere computing is done. The statement came after investors reacted to the release of Google's Gemini 3 large language model last week. The model was trained using TPUs rather than Nvidia chips. A report in The Information on Monday said Google was pitching potential clients including Meta on using TPUs in their data centers rather than Nvidia's chips. Nvidia said its platform offers "greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs," referring to application-specific integrated circuits like Google's TPUs that are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions. Google's TPUs have until now only been available for customers to rent through its cloud computing service. Nvidia has lost more than $800 billion in market value since it peaked above $5 trillion less than a month ago.

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State-backed crews are already poking at autonomous tools, Trend Micro warns

Cybercriminals, including ransomware crews, will lean more heavily on agentic AI next year as attackers automate more of their operations, Trend Micro's researchers believe.…

The abstract of a paper on NBER: This paper examines a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in 531 Peruvian rural primary schools. We use administrative data on academic performance and grade progression over 10 years to estimate the long-run effects of increased computer access on (i) school performance over time and (ii) students' educational trajectories. Following schools over time, we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression. Following students over time, we find no significant effects on primary and secondary completion, academic performance in secondary school, or university enrollment. Survey data indicate that computer access significantly improved students' computer skills but not their cognitive skills; treated teachers received some training but did not improve their digital skills and showed limited use of technology in classrooms, suggesting the need for additional pedagogical support.

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The brain goes through five distinct phases in life, with key turning points at ages nine, 32, 66 and 83, scientists have revealed. From a report: Around 4,000 people up to the age of 90 had scans to reveal the connections between their brain cells. Researchers at the University of Cambridge showed that the brain stays in the adolescent phase until our early thirties when we "peak." They say the results could help us understand why the risk of mental health disorders and dementia varies through life. The brain is constantly changing in response to new knowledge and experience -- but the research shows this is not one smooth pattern from birth to death. Some people will reach these landmarks earlier or later than others -- but the researchers said it was striking how clearly these ages stood out in the data. These patterns have only now been revealed due to the quantity of brain scans available in the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Windows Insider build intros background loading for faster launches, sidestepping questions about app's sluggishness

Microsoft is tackling File Explorer's sluggish launch times - not by stripping out the bloat or optimizing code, but by preloading the application in the background.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Solid-state drives sitting unpowered in drawers or storage can lose data over time because voltage gradually leaks from their NAND flash cells, and consumer-grade drives using QLC NAND retain data for about a year while TLC NAND lasts up to three years without power. More expensive MLC and SLC NAND can hold data for five and ten years respectively. The voltage loss can result in missing data or completely unusable drives. Hard drives remain more resistant to power loss despite their susceptibility to bit rot. Most users relying on SSDs for primary storage in regularly powered computers face little risk since drives typically stay unpowered for only a few months at most. The concern mainly affects creative professionals and researchers who need long-term archival storage.

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German mega vendor responds to latest in-house survey

An internal SAP employee survey reveals declining confidence in leadership as the software giant's restructuring program continues, with trust in the executive board waning in the past six months.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Singapore's police have ordered Apple and Google to prevent the spoofing of government agencies on their messaging platforms, the home affairs ministry said on Tuesday. The order under the nation's Online Criminal Harms Act came after the police observed scams on Apple's iMessage and Google Messages purporting to be from companies such as the local postal service SingPost. While government agencies have registered with a local SMS registry so only they can send messages with the "gov.sg" name, this does not currently apply to the iMessage and Google Messages platforms.

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DOE told to build a unified research platform linking federal compute, datasets, and national labs

US President Trump has ordered the launch of the "Genesis Mission," a national effort to use AI to drive scientific discoveries, with the aim of strengthening America's technological leadership and global competitiveness.…

Security chief placed on leave pending investigation

Campbell's has placed its US CISO and vice president on temporary leave while it investigates allegations that he disparaged customers, the company's products, and Indian staffers.…

In the latest Windows Insider beta update, Microsoft has announced that it is exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to improve launch performance. The feature will load File Explorer silently before users click on it and can be toggled off for those who prefer not to use it. Microsoft introduced a similar capability earlier this year for Office called Startup Boost that loads parts of Word in the background so the application launches more quickly. The company is also removing elements from the File Explorer context menu in the same update.

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Capsule might only manage three crewed missions to the ISS

NASA has modified its Commercial Crew contract with Boeing, dropping the order from six to four missions, of which one will be uncrewed.…

Uni notifies 1,400-plus Maine residents as zero-day fallout continues

Dartmouth College has confirmed it's the latest victim of Clop's Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) smash-and-grab.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Lenovo is stockpiling memory and other critical components to navigate a supply crunch brought on by the boom in artificial intelligence. The world's biggest PC maker is holding on to component inventories that are roughly 50% higher than usual, Chief Financial Officer Winston Cheng told Bloomberg TV on Monday. The frenzy to build and fill AI data centers with advanced hardware is raising prices for producers of consumer electronics, but Lenovo also sees opportunity in this to capitalize on its stockpile. "The price is going very, very high, of course, and I think it's been unprecedented in terms of this rate driven by the AI demand," Cheng said. His company has long-term contracts in place and the benefit of scale, he added, and "those that have the supply actually would be able to have a position in the market." Beijing-based Lenovo will aim to avoid passing on rising costs to its customers in the current quarter, as it wants to sustain this year's strong sales growth, according to the CFO. He said the company will strike a balance between price and availability in 2026. Lenovo said last week that it has enough memory chips for all of 2026 and it can navigate any shortages better than its competitors.

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