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Chipmaker keen to protect assets as race for 2nm process heats up

Taiwanese prosecutors have charged three people over the alleged theft of TSMC's trade secrets.…

Vintage computing boffinry to please palmtop enthusiasts

Vintage computing enthusiast Colin Hoad has released a gift to anyone who fondly remembers Psion's classic EPOC-based palmtops and their Open Programming Language (OPL): a language server which brings modern quality-of-life features to the OPL programmer, regardless of their development environment.…

South Korea has passed a bill banning the use of mobile phones and smart devices during class hours in schools -- becoming the latest country to restrict phone use among children and teens. From a report: The law, which comes into effect from the next school year in March 2026, is the result of a bi-partisan effort to curb smartphone addiction, as more research points to its harmful effects. Lawmakers, parents and teachers argue that smartphone use is affecting students' academic performance and takes away time they could have spent studying.

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French provider seizes on Redmond's admission that US law could override local protections

Interview European cloud provider OVHcloud has long warned about the risks of relying on foreign tech giants for critical infrastructure – especially when it comes to data sovereignty.…

Wikipedia's volunteer editors have rejected founder Jimmy Wales' proposal to use ChatGPT for article review guidance after the AI tool produced error-filled feedback when Wales tested it on a draft submission. The ChatGPT response misidentified Wikipedia policies, suggested citing non-existent sources and recommended using press releases despite explicit policy prohibitions. Editors argued automated systems producing incorrect advice would undermine Wikipedia's human-centered model. The conflict follows earlier tensions over the Wikimedia Foundation's AI experiments, including a paused AI summary feature and new policies targeting AI-generated content.

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Hybrid of GNUstep and Xfce channels classic NeXT vibes

The latest release of GhostBSD, an easy graphical FreeBSD distribution, includes a brand new macOS-like desktop environment, "Gershwin."…

Digital resurrections of deceased individuals are emerging as the next commercial frontier in AI, with the digital afterlife industry projected to reach $80 billion within a decade. Companies developing these AI avatars are exploring revenue models ranging from interstitial advertising during conversations to data collection about users' preferences. StoryFile CEO Alex Quinn confirmed his company is exploring methods to monetize interactions between users and deceased relatives' digital replicas, including probing for consumer information during conversations. The technology has already demonstrated persuasive capabilities in legal proceedings, where an AI recreation of road rage victim Chris Pelkey delivered testimony that contributed to a maximum sentence. Current implementations operate through subscription models, though no federal regulations govern commercial applications of posthumous AI representations despite state-level protections for deceased individuals' likeness rights.

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Attackers steal OAuth tokens to access third-party sales platform, then CRM data in 'widespread campaign'

Google says a recent spate of Salesforce-related breaches was caused by attackers stealing OAuth tokens from the third-party Salesloft Drift app.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinTelegraph: Paying interest on stablecoin deposits could spark a wave of bank outflows similar to the money market fund boom of the 1980s, Citi's Future of Finance head Ronit Ghose warned in a report published Monday. According to the Financial Times, Ghose compared the potential outflows caused by paying interest on stablecoins to the rise of money market funds in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those funds ballooned from about $4 billion in 1975 to $235 billion in 1982, outpacing banks whose deposit rates were tightly regulated, Federal Reserve data showed. Withdrawals from bank accounts exceeded new deposits by $32 billion between 1981 and 1982. Sean Viergutz, banking and capital markets advisory leader at consultancy PwC, similarly suggested that a shift from consumers to higher-yielding stablecoins could spell trouble for the banking sector. "Banks may face higher funding costs by relying more on wholesale markets or raising deposit rates, which could make credit more expensive for households and businesses," he said. The GENIUS Act does not allow stablecoin issuers to offer interest to holders, but it does not extend the ban to crypto exchanges or affiliated businesses. The regulatory setup led to a significant reaction by the banking sector. Several US banking groups led by the Bank Policy Institute have urged local regulators to close what they say is a loophole that may indirectly allow stablecoin issuers to pay interest or yields on stablecoins. In a recent letter, the organization argued that the so-called loophole may disrupt the flow of credit to American businesses and families, potentially triggering $6.6 trillion in deposit outflows from the traditional banking system.

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Because the DBaaS has lately become AI-tastic, among other things

It's less than two years since MariaDB spun out SkySQL, but it's already unspinning the database-as-a-service outfit, which has since been marinated in AI sauce.…

$23B deal with AT&T shows where the money is

US telco EchoStar, valued around $14.5 billion on Wednesday morning, has sold its American spectrum allocation to AT&T for $23 billion.…

The DevOps dance has new steps, but Virtzilla thinks it can teach ops folks to tango

Private clouds are all about keeping developers happy and productive, according to Krish Prasad, senior veep and general manager of Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation division.…

Explosions all expected and on schedule this time

SpaceX has finally managed a test flight of Starship without anything creating an impromptu firework display.…