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Rockstar Games, the company behind the hit Grand Theft Auto franchise, said that the dozens of employees it fired last week were leaking company secrets, disputing allegations by labor leaders that it was disrupting workers' attempt to unionize. From a report: The employees had been sharing company information in a forum that included non-employees, a Rockstar spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg on Wednesday. "Last week, we took action against a small number of individuals who were found to be distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum, a violation of our company policies," the spokesperson said. "This was in no way related to people's right to join a union or engage in union activities." The company, part of Take-Two Interactive Software, fired between 30 and 40 employees across offices in the UK and Canada for what it said was "gross misconduct." The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, the first to organize video-game workers in the UK, told Bloomberg that the employees had all been involved with union efforts at Rockstar, calling the firings "one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry."

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Shopping bots pick first option and are 'vulnerable to manipulation', Magentic Marketplace trial finds

Ready to have your agent talk to my agent and arrange a sale? Microsoft has published a simulated marketplace to put AI agents through their paces and answer a question for the new age: Would you trust AI with your credit card?…

Most of you still can't do better than 123456?

123456. admin. password. For years, the IT world has been reminding users not to rely on such predictable passwords. And yet here we are with another study finding that those sorts of quickly-guessable, universally-held-to-be-bad passwords are still the most popular ones.…

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the US in the AI race, thanks to lower energy costs and looser regulations. From a report: In the starkest comments yet from the head of the world's most valuable company, Huang told the FT: "China is going to win the AI race." Huang's remarks come after the Trump administration maintained a ban on California-based Nvidia selling its most advanced chips to Beijing following a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week. The Nvidia chief said that the west, including the US and UK, was being held back by "cynicism." "We need more optimism," Huang said on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Financial Times' Future of AI Summit. Huang singled out new rules on AI by US states that could result in "50 new regulations." He contrasted that approach with Chinese energy subsidies that made it more affordable for local tech companies to run Chinese alternatives to Nvidia's AI chips. "Power is free," he said.

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Intune is where the party's at, even if admins might prefer the Configuration Manager kitchen

Microsoft has officially confirmed that Configuration Manager will transition to an annual release cadence, with Intune as the primary focus for innovation.…

A curious engineer discovered that his iLife A11 smart vacuum was remotely "killed" after he blocked it from sending data to the manufacturer's servers. By reverse-engineering it with custom hardware and Python scripts, he managed to revive the device to run fully offline. Tom's Hardware reports: An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer -- something he hadn't consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device. He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again. After several rounds of back-and-forth, the service center probably got tired and just stopped accepting it, saying it was out of warranty. Because of this, he decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again. [...] So, why did the A11 work at the service center but refuse to run in his home? The technicians would reset the firmware on the smart vacuum, thus removing the kill code, and then connect it to an open network, making it run normally. But once it connected again to the network that had its telemetry servers blocked, it was bricked remotely because it couldn't communicate with the manufacturer's servers. Since he blocked the appliance's data collection capabilities, its maker decided to just kill it altogether. "Someone -- or something -- had remotely issued a kill command," says Harishankar. "Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of 'compliance,' the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner." In the end, the owner was able to run his vacuum fully locally without manufacturer control after all the tweaks he made. This helped him retake control of his data and make use of his $300 software-bricked smart device on his own terms. As for the rest of us who don't have the technical knowledge and time to follow his accomplishments, his advice is to "Never use your primary WiFi network for IoT devices" and to "Treat them as strangers in your home."

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Spies, not crooks, were behind digital heist – damage stopped at the backups, says US cybersec biz

SonicWall has blamed an unnamed, state-sponsored collective for the September break-in that saw cybercriminals rifle through a cache of firewall configuration backups.…

Three hyperscale sheds to double capacity near Heathrow

Colt Data Centre Services has secured approval to invest £2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) in three hyperscale data centers at its Hayes Digital Park campus in west London.…

Stolen creds let miscreants waltz into 17K employees' chats, spilling info on staff and partners

Japanese media behemoth Nikkei has admitted to a data breach after miscreants slipped into its internal Slack workspace, exposing the personal details of more than 17,000 employees and business partners.…

Science loses when lab workers grapple with costs and availability, claim researchers

Cloud vendors’ commercial models poorly serve scientists, forcing them to struggle for value amid tightening budgets, according to research.…

China has delayed the return of its Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft after it was suspected to have been struck by space debris while docked at the Tiangong space station. "The Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft is suspected of being struck by a small piece of space debris, and impact analysis and risk assessment are underway," the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) statement Nov. 5 read. "To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou-20 return mission, originally scheduled for Nov. 5, will be postponed." SpaceNews reports: CMSEO did not specify the location of the suspected strike, the extent of any damage, or the data that indicated an impact. No potential dates were noted for a return to Earth. The Shenzhou-20 spacecraft launched April 24, carrying three astronauts -- commander Chen Dong and crewmates Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie -- to the Tiangong space station. The spacecraft docked at the radial port of Tiangong's Tianhe core module. The crew have completed their six-month-long mission in orbit, and had handed over control of the space station to the newly-arrived Shenzhou-21 crew Nov. 4. Checks on the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft could include telemetry and leak tests, verifying guidance and propulsion systems, and screening for impacts in accelerometer and acoustic sensor data. A key concern would be potential damage to the spacecraft's thermal protection system or parachute deployment structures, both critical for safe atmospheric reentry and landing. Tiangong features a 10-meter-long robotic arm, capable of crawling, and a smaller, more precise arm. These could be employed to position cameras and provide closeup imagery of a potential impact. Crews may be able to conduct an extravehicular activity (EVA) to assess the situation. Tiangong crews have recently added debris shields during a number of EVAs; the same procedures, tools, and arm support can be adapted for a Shenzhou inspection.

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Parliamentary report calls for sovereign launch capability and reduced dependence on US services

The UK's House of Lords UK Engagement with Space Committee has published a scathing report, "The Space Economy: Act Now or Lose Out," declaring that the 2021 National Space Strategy has "failed to turn its ambitions into reality."…

A new study challenges the Nobel-winning theory that the universe's expansion is accelerating, suggesting instead that it may be slowing down as dark energy weakens -- potentially leading to a future "big crunch" where the cosmos collapses back in on itself. "Our study shows that the universe has already entered a phase of decelerated expansion at the present epoch and that dark energy evolves with time much more rapidly than previously thought," said Prof Young-Wook Lee, of Yonsei University in South Korea, who led the work. "If these results are confirmed, it would mark a major paradigm shift in cosmology since the discovery of dark energy 27 years ago." The Guardian reports: The latest work focuses on the reliability of observations of distant supernovae (exploding stars) that led to the discovery of dark energy, work that was awarded the 2011 Nobel prize in physics. [...] By estimating the ages of 300 host galaxies using a different method, the team concluded that there are simply variations in the properties of stars in the early universe that mean they produce, on average, fainter supernovae. Correcting for this systematic bias still results in an expanding universe, but suggests that the expansion has slowed down and that dark energy is waning, the analysis concluded. If dark energy keeps decreasing to the point where it becomes negative, the universe is theoretically predicted to end in a big crunch. The findings are published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Middle Kingdom also postpones astronaut return mission after something hit its spaceship

China has matched the European Space Agency’s feat of taking a snapshot of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from a Mars orbiter.…

Awkward, seeing as they’re close partners

Qualcomm and Arm have offered differing predictions regarding the market for inferencing silicon.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The US- and UK-based company Quantinuum today unveiled Helios, its third-generation quantum computer, which includes expanded computing power and error correction capability. Like all other existing quantum computers, Helios is not powerful enough to execute the industry's dream money-making algorithms, such as those that would be useful for materials discovery or financial modeling. But Quantinuum's machines, which use individual ions as qubits, could be easier to scale up than quantum computers that use superconducting circuits as qubits, such as Google's and IBM's. "Helios is an important proof point in our road map about how we'll scale to larger physical systems," says Jennifer Strabley, vice president at Quantinuum, which formed in 2021 from the merger of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum. Honeywell remains Quantinuum's majority owner. Located at Quantinuum's facility in Colorado, Helios comprises a myriad of components, including mirrors, lasers, and optical fiber. Its core is a thumbnail-size chip containing the barium ions that serve as the qubits, which perform the actual computing. Helios computes with 98 barium ions at a time; its predecessor, H2, used 56 ytterbium qubits. The barium ions are an upgrade, as they have proven easier to control than ytterbium. These components all sit within a chamber that is cooled to about 15 Kelvin (-432.67 ), on top of an optical table. Users can access the computer by logging in remotely over the cloud. [...] Helios is noteworthy for its qubits' precision, says Rajibul Islam, a physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who is not affiliated with Quantinuum. The computer's qubit error rates are low to begin with, which means it doesn't need to devote as much of its hardware to error correction. Quantinuum had pairs of qubits interact in an operation known as entanglement and found that they behaved as expected 99.921% of the time. "To the best of my knowledge, no other platform is at this level," says Islam. [...] Besides increasing the number of qubits on its chip, another notable achievement for Quantinuum is that it demonstrated error correction "on the fly," says David Hayes, the company's director of computational theory and design, That's a new capability for its machines. Nvidia GPUs were used to identify errors in the qubits in parallel. Hayes thinks that GPUs are more effective for error correction than chips known as FPGAs, also used in the industry. Quantinuum has used its computers to investigate the basic physics of magnetism and superconductivity. Earlier this year, it reported simulating a magnet on H2, Quantinuum's predecessor, with the claim that it "rivals the best classical approaches in expanding our understanding of magnetism." Along with announcing the introduction of Helios, the company has used the machine to simulate the behavior of electrons in a high-temperature superconductor. Quantinuum is expanding its Helios line with a new system in Minnesota. It's also started developing its fourth-generation quantum computer, Sol, set for 2027 with 192 qubits. Then, a fifth-generation system, Apollo, is expected in 2029 with thousands of qubits and full fault tolerance.

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A bungled October 18 heist that saw $102 million of crown jewels stolen from the Louvre in broad daylight has exposed years of lax security at the national art museum. From trivial passwords like 'LOUVRE' to decades-old, unsupported systems and easy rooftop access, the job was made surprisingly easy. PC Gamer reports: As Rogue cofounder and former Polygon arch-jester Cass Marshall notes on Bluesky, we owe a lot of videogame designers an apology. We've spent years dunking on the emptyheadedness of game characters leaving their crucial security codes and vault combinations in the open for anyone to read, all while the Louvre has been using the password "Louvre" for its video surveillance servers. That's not an exaggeration. Confidential documents reviewed by Liberation detail a long history of Louvre security vulnerabilities, dating back to a 2014 cybersecurity audit performed by the French Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) at the museum's request. ANSSI experts were able to infiltrate the Louvre's security network to manipulate video surveillance and modify badge access. "How did the experts manage to infiltrate the network? Primarily due to the weakness of certain passwords which the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) politely describes as 'trivial,'" writes Liberation's Brice Le Borgne via machine translation. "Type 'LOUVRE' to access a server managing the museum's video surveillance, or 'THALES' to access one of the software programs published by... Thales." The museum sought another audit from France's National Institute for Advanced Studies in Security and Justice in 2015. Concluded two years later, the audit's 40 pages of recommendations described "serious shortcomings," "poorly managed" visitor flow, rooftops that are easily accessible during construction work, and outdated and malfunctioning security systems. Later documents indicate that, in 2025, the Louvre was still using security software purchased in 2003 that is no longer supported by its developer, running on hardware using Windows Server 2003.

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Even offers refunds if users sign up for AI they don’t want

Microsoft Australia has apologized to users of its M365 suite after regulators accused it of steering them towards pricey bundles that include its Copilot AI service.…

A new survey of over 300 US and UK gaming executives found that 72% view Steam as a monopoly. "Furthermore, 88% said that at least three-quarters of their revenue came from Steam, while 37% reported that the platform accounted for 90% of their total revenue," adds Techspot. From the report: Atomik Research conducted the recent survey on behalf of Rokky, a company that helps game publishers minimize the impact of grey market key resellers on prices. In addition to opinions on Steam, developers also answered questions about the PC market's biggest challenges. The increasing popularity of free-to-play games such as Fortnite, DOTA 2, Counter-Strike 2, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Roblox topped the list of concerns for 40% of respondents. Approximately a third mentioned market saturation and discoverability, echoing data that suggests there aren't enough players for the thousands of new titles released on Steam each year. A similar portion of survey respondents also expressed concerns regarding subscription services.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Google Maps is heading in a new direction with artificial intelligence sitting in the passenger's seat. Fueled by Google's Gemini AI technology, the world's most popular navigation app will become a more conversational companion as part of a redesign announced Wednesday. The hands-free experience is meant to turn Google Maps into something more like an insightful passenger able to direct a driver to a destination while also providing nearby recommendations on places to eat, shop or sightsee, when asked for the advice. "No fumbling required -- now you can just ask," Google promised in a blog post about the app makeover. The AI features are also supposed to enable Google Maps to be more precise by calling out landmarks to denote the place to make a turn instead of relying on distance notifications. AI chatbots, like Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT, have sometimes lapsed into periods of making things up -- known as "hallucinations" in tech speak -- but Google is promising that built-in safeguards will prevent Maps from accidentally sending drivers down the wrong road. All the information that Gemini is drawing upon will be culled from the roughly 250 million places stored in Google Maps' database of reviews accumulated during the past 20 years. Google Maps' new AI capabilities will be rolling out to both Apple's iPhone and Android mobile devices.

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