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Europe risks undermining its own competitiveness drive by restricting access to foreign technology, Google's president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker told the Financial Times, as Brussels accelerates efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants. Walker said the EU faces a "competitive paradox" as it seeks to spur growth while restricting the technologies needed to achieve that goal. He warned against erecting walls that make it harder to use some of the best technology in the world, especially as it advances quickly. EU leaders gathered Thursday for a summit in Belgium focused on increasing European competitiveness in a more volatile global economy. Europe's digital sovereignty push gained momentum in recent months, driven by fears that President Donald Trump's foreign policy could force a tech decoupling.

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Spotify's best developers have stopped writing code manually since December and now rely on an internal AI system called Honk that enables remote, real-time code deployment through Claude Code, the company's co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom said during a fourth-quarter earnings call this week. Engineers can fix bugs or add features to the iOS app from Slack on their phones during their morning commute and receive a new version of the app pushed to Slack before arriving at the office. The system has helped Spotify ship more than 50 new features throughout 2025, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song. Soderstrom credited the system with speeding up coding and deployment tremendously and called it "just the beginning" for AI development at Spotify. The company is building a unique music dataset that differs from factual resources like Wikipedia because music-related questions often lack single correct answers -- workout music preferences vary from American hip-hop to Scandinavian heavy metal.

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As if admins haven't had enough to do this week

Ignore patches at your own risk. According to Uncle Sam, a SQL injection flaw in Microsoft Configuration Manager patched in October 2024 is now being actively exploited, exposing unpatched businesses and government agencies to attack.…

The US Federal Trade Commission is accelerating scrutiny of Microsoft as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths of the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings, including Copilot. From a report: The agency has issued civil investigative demands in recent weeks to companies that compete with Microsoft in the business software and cloud computing markets, according to people familiar with the matter. The demands feature an array of questions on Microsoft's licensing and other business practices, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation. With the demands, which are effectively like civil subpoenas, the FTC is seeking evidence that Microsoft makes it harder for customers to use Windows, Office and other products on rival cloud services. The agency is also requesting information on Microsoft's bundling of artificial intelligence, security and identity software into other products, including Windows and Office, some of the people said.

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DoE bets AI can speed fusion, unlock decades of nuclear data, and probe fundamental physics

The Trump administration has outlined the first 26 goals for its project to inject AI into the government's scientific research, and everything from securing critical minerals to discovering a unified theory of physics is on the table. …

Q4 figures reveal shifting market share across PCs and cloud infrastructure

Intel continues to lose market share to rival AMD across server, desktop, and mobile processors, and this has been noticeable in PCs thanks to supply constraints on Chipzilla's processors.…

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding the legal finding that it has relied on for nearly two decades to limit the heat-trapping pollution that spews from vehicle tailpipes, oil refineries and factories. From a report: The repeal of that landmark determination, known as the endangerment finding, will upend most U.S. policies aimed at curbing climate change. The finding -- which the EPA issued in 2009 -- said the global warming caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endangers the health and welfare of current and future generations. "We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy," Trump said at a news conference. "This determination had no basis in fact -- none whatsoever. And it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world." Major environmental groups have disputed the administration's stance on the endangerment finding and have been preparing to sue in response to its repeal.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News. In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of "ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs." The company said it had detected "new, obfuscated methods" designed to evade OpenAI's defenses against misuse of its models' output. OpenAI began privately raising concerns about the practice shortly after the R1 model's release last year, when it opened a probe with partner Microsoft Corp. into whether DeepSeek had obtained its data in an unauthorized manner, Bloomberg previously reported. In distillation, one AI model relies on the output of another for training purposes to develop similar capabilities. Distillation, largely tied to China and occasionally Russia, has persisted and become more sophisticated despite attempts to crack down on users who violate OpenAI's terms of service, the company said in its memo, citing activity it has observed on its platform.

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Waymo's autonomous vehicles can transport passengers across six cities without a human driver, but the Alphabet-owned company has discovered that its cars become completely inert if a passenger accidentally leaves a door open. The company confirmed that it is now paying DoorDash drivers in Atlanta to close these doors as part of a pilot program. A Reddit post from a DoorDash driver showed an offer of $6.25 to drive less than one mile to a Waymo vehicle and close its door, plus an additional $5 after verified completion. Waymo and DoorDash told TechCrunch the post is legitimate. The door-closing partnership began earlier this year and is separate from the autonomous delivery service the two companies launched in Phoenix in October. Waymo has also worked with Honk, a towing service app, in Los Angeles on the same problem. Honk users in L.A. have been offered up to $24 to close a Waymo door. Future Waymo vehicles will have automated door closures.

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Prices for router and set-top boxes up nearly sevenfold, squeezing telcos and raising deployment costs

Prices for memory used in routers and set-top boxes are surging nearly sevenfold thanks to AI, raising fresh fears that the industry's silicon binge could leave telcos scrambling to get customers online.…

Rapid rollout into cyber-physical systems raises outage risk, Gartner warns

The next blackout to plunge a G20 nation into chaos might not come courtesy of cybercriminals or bad weather, but from an AI system tripping over its own shoelaces.…

theodp writes: West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state's recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency requirement. Not too surprisingly, the Bill is being opposed by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which lobbied for the WV CS graduation requirement (PDF) just last year. Code.org recently pivoted its mission to emphasize the importance of teaching AI education alongside traditional CS, teaming up with tech CEOs and leaders last year to launch a national campaign to mandate CS and AI courses as graduation requirements. "It would basically turn the standalone computer science course requirement into a computer literacy proficiency requirement that's more focused on digital literacy," lamented Code.org as it discussed the Bill in a Wednesday conference call with members of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, including reps from Microsoft's Education and Workforce Policy team. "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those. We are talking with the chair and vice chair of the committee a week from today to try to see if we can nip this in the bud." Concerns were also raised on the call about how widespread the desire for more computing literacy proficiency (over CS) might be, as well as about legislators who are associating AI literacy more with digital literacy than CS. The proposed move from a narrower CS focus to a broader goal of computer literacy proficiency in WV schools comes just months after the UK's Department for Education announced a similar curriculum pivot to broader digital literacy, abandoning the narrower 'rigorous CS' focus that was adopted more than a decade ago in response to a push by a 'grassroots' coalition that included Google, Microsoft, UK charities, and other organizations.

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Bitbarn nuke campus to be sited at Idaho National Laboratory

Nuclear-powered datacenters in the US are moving closer as a consortium prepares to build proposed facilities for the Department of Energy (DoE) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).…

Move comes against backdrop of disasterclass Super Bowl ad

Ring has cut ties with Flock, citing resource constraints, mere months after the pair announced a partnership.…

$380B post-money valuation for a company that's yet to turn a profit? Sure, why not

The AI bubble continues to inflate with Anthropic's announcement of $30 billion in Series G funding at a $380 billion post-money valuation.…

Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, New York Times reported Friday, five years after the social giant shut down facial recognition on Facebook and promised to find "the right balance" for the controversial technology. The feature, internally called "Name Tag," would let wearers identify people and retrieve information about them through Meta's AI assistant, the report added. An internal memo from May acknowledged the feature carries "safety and privacy risks" and noted that political tumult in the United States would distract civil society groups that might otherwise criticize the launch. The company is exploring restrictions that would prevent the glasses from functioning as a universal facial recognition tool, potentially limiting identification to people connected on Meta platforms or those with public accounts.

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Fiery mid-flight incident not enough to derail US Space Force mission

United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur reached orbit on February 12 despite "a significant performance anomaly" that saw one of its four solid rocket boosters burn through its nozzle during ascent.…

One destination passengers were definitely not hoping to reach

Bork!Bork!Bork! As if to demonstrate that whatever one operating system can do, Windows can do it better, bluer, and upside down, we present a bus stopping only at bork.…

Watchdog says savings bank botched tech revamp, warning taxpayers remain exposed after years of delays

Britain's state-backed savings bank has been dragged over the coals by Parliament's spending watchdog, which has branded its long-running digital overhaul a £3 billion "full-spectrum disaster."…

Names, addresses, bank account numbers accessed – but biz insists passwords and call data untouched

The Netherlands' largest mobile network operator (MNO) has admitted that a breach of its customer contact system may have affected around 6.2 million people.…