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alternative_right writes: The city of Munich has developed its own measurement instrument to assess the digital sovereignty of its IT infrastructure. The so-called Digital Sovereignty Score (SDS) visually resembles the Nutri-Score and identifies IT systems based on their independence from individual providers and 'foreign' legal spheres. The Technical University of Munich was involved in the development. In September and October 2025, the IT Department already conducted a first comprehensive test. Out of a total of 2780 municipal application services, 194 particularly critical ones were selected and evaluated based on five categories. The analysis already showed a high degree of digital sovereignty: 66% of the 194 evaluated services reached the highest levels (SDS 1 and 2), only 5% reached the critical level 4, and 21% reached the most critical level 5. The SDS evaluates not only technical dependencies but also legal and organizational risks.

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It's a threat straight out of sci-fi, and fiendishly hard to detect

Sleeper agent-style backdoors in AI large language models pose a straight-out-of-sci-fi security threat.…

Picks chap who used to lead Redmond’s security, lures replacement from Google

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has decided Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar, and shifted Charlie Bell, the company’s executive veep for security, into the new role.…

Valve has pushed back the launch of its Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller hardware from its original Q1 2026 window to a vaguer "first half of the year" target, blaming the ongoing memory and storage shortage that has been squeezing the tech industry. The company said in a post today that rising component prices and limited availability forced it to revisit both its shipping schedule and pricing plans. Valve had previously indicated the Steam Machine would be priced at the entry level of the PC space.

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On the upside, House of the Snapdragon has started shipping its own AI silicon

Qualcomm has warned that soaring memory prices will mean the smartphone industry will slow, news that so spooked investors they sent the company’s share price sliding by 11 percent.…

BMW may have retreated from its controversial plan to charge monthly fees for heated seats, but the German automaker is pressing ahead with subscription-based vehicle features through its ConnectedDrive platform. A company spokesperson told The Drive that BMW "remains fully committed" to ConnectedDrive as part of its global aftersales strategy. Features requiring data connectivity will likely carry recurring fees.

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With revenue topping $400B for the first time, the Chocolate Factory is at no risk of putting itself in the poor house

Google’s parent Alphabet is doubling down on generative AI in 2026. On Wednesday's earnings call, the search and advertising giant boosted its full-year capital expenditures target to between $175 and $185 billion, roughly twice what it spent last year.…

Microsoft has finally delivered on its promise to integrate Sysmon -- the long-standing system monitoring tool from its Sysinternals suite -- directly into Windows, a move that should make life considerably easier for enterprise administrators who have struggled with deploying and managing the utility across thousands of endpoints. The functionality landed this week in Windows Insider builds 26300.7733 (Dev channel) and 26220.7752 (Beta channel). Sysmon allows administrators to capture system events through custom configuration files, filter for specific activity, and pipe the data into standard Windows event logs for pickup by security tools and SIEM pipelines. Mark Russinovich, Microsoft technical fellow and Winternals co-founder, has previously noted the lack of official customer support for Sysmon in production environments -- a gap this integration addresses. The feature ships disabled by default and requires PowerShell to enable. Microsoft notes that any existing Sysmon installation must be uninstalled before activating the built-in version.

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Proposed bills in New York and elsewhere threaten makers, Adafruit says

State and federal lawmakers have stepped up their efforts to prevent the creation of 3D printed guns. But Adafruit, a maker of electronics kits, warns that the proposed legislation is so broad it threatens everyone involved in open source manufacturing and technology education.…

Job cuts to fall hardest on non-revenue generating roles on the Global Customer Operations team

Workday is laying off about two percent of its staff in a bid to align its people with its “highest priorities,” but at a significant cost to its margins for the quarter and the year, the company announced on Wednesday.…

RAG bots could overtake human visitors on publisher sites this year, trackers tell us

The AI bot takeover of the internet continues apace, and the latest data suggests the surge is being driven less by model-training scrapes and more by the growing use of AI tools as a stand-in for web search.…

Pleb-tier LPDDR5x apparently good enough for Arm-backed AI startup's next-gen Asimov accelerators

On paper, Positron's next-gen Asimov accelerators, no doubt named for the beloved science fiction author, don't look like much of a match for Nvidia's Rubin GPUs.…

LLMs automated most phases of the attack

A digital intruder broke into an AWS cloud environment and in just under 10 minutes went from initial access to administrative privileges, thanks to an AI speed assist.…

European security officials believe two Russian space vehicles have intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over the continent. From a report: Officials believe that the likely interceptions, which have not previously been reported, risk not only compromising sensitive information transmitted by the satellites but could also allow Moscow to manipulate their trajectories or even crash them. Russian space vehicles have shadowed European satellites more intensively over the past three years, at a time of high tension between the Kremlin and the West following Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For several years, military and civilian space authorities in the West have been tracking the activities of Luch-1 and Luch-2 -- two Russian objects that have carried out repeated suspicious maneuvers in orbit. Both vehicles have made risky close approaches to some of Europe's most important geostationary satellites, which operate high above the Earth and service the continent, including the UK, as well as large parts of Africa and the Middle East. According to orbital data and ground-based telescopic observations, they have lingered nearby for weeks at a time, particularly over the past three years. Since its launch in 2023, Luch-2 has approached 17 European satellites.

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As profit-starved AI companies scramble to monetize chat interactions, Claude bets on trust

Anthropic has taken the high road by committing to keep its Claude AI model family free of advertising.…

A sprawling informal economy of rogue streaming devices has taken hold across the U.S., as consumers fed up with rising TV subscription costs turn to cheap Android-based boxes that promise free access to thousands of live channels, sports events, and on-demand movies for a one-time $200 to $400 purchase. The two dominant players -- SuperBox and vSeeBox -- are manufactured by opaque Chinese companies and distributed through hundreds of American resellers at farmers markets, church festivals and Facebook groups, according to a report by The Verge. The hardware is generic and legal, but both devices guide users toward pirate streaming apps not available on any official app store. vSeeBox directs users to a service called "Heat"; SuperBox points to "Blue TV." One user estimated access to between 6,000 and 8,000 channels, including premium sports networks and hundreds of local affiliates. A 2025 Dish Network lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller alleged that some live channels on the device were being ripped directly from Dish's Sling TV service -- Sling's logo was still visible on certain feeds. Dish has pursued resellers aggressively, winning $1.25 million in damages from a vSeeBox seller in 2024 over 500 devices and $405,000 from another over 162 devices. None of this has meaningfully slowed adoption. The market has roots in earlier Chinese-made devices like TVPad that targeted Asian expat communities and reportedly sold 3 million units before being litigated out of existence. SuperBox and vSeeBox simply broadened the audience to mainstream America.

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US agencies told to patch by Friday

Attackers are exploiting a critical SolarWinds Web Help Desk bug - less than a week after the vendor disclosed and fixed the 9.8-rated flaw. That's according to America's lead cyber-defense agency, which set a Friday deadline for federal agencies to patch the security flaw.…

Investors were assessing on Wednesday whether a selloff in global software stocks this week had gone too far, as they weighed if businesses could survive an existential threat posed by AI. The answer: It's unclear and will lead to volatility. From a report: After a broad selloff on Tuesday that saw the S&P 500 software and services index fall nearly 4%, the sector slipped another 1% on Wednesday. While software stocks have been under pressure in recent months as AI has gone from being a tailwind for many of these companies to investors worrying about the disruption it will cause to some sectors, the latest selloff was triggered by a new legal tool from Anthropic's Claude large language model (LLM). The tool - a plug-in for Claude's agent for tasks across legal, sales, marketing and data analysis - underscored the push by LLMs into the so-called "application layer," where these firms are increasingly muscling into lucrative enterprise businesses for revenue they need to fund massive investments. If successful, investors worry, it could wreak havoc across a range of industries, from finance to law and coding.

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The writing is on the wall as AI companies race to add vertical functionality

Software stocks have taken a beating over the last month as investors grow concerned that AI could put vertical SaaS vendors out of business.…

Just in time for the predicted rise of AI-assisted threats

It's bot versus bot! Just in time for the predicted rise of AI-made biological and chemical weapons, the US Army has plans to fight autonomy with autonomy by getting its hands on some bot-based chemical weapon cleanup tech.…