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Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after internal tests showed it lagging behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The New York Times reports: The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta's previous A.I. model and did better than Google's Gemini 2.5 model from March, two of the people said. But it has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November, they said. As a result, Meta has delayed Avocado's release to at least May from this month, the people said. They added that the leaders of Meta's A.I. division had instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company's A.I. products, though no decisions have been reached. [...] It takes time to improve A.I. models, and Meta can still catch up to rivals, A.I. experts said. But a longer timeline has set in at the company, with Mr. Zuckerberg tempering expectations for Avocado in the past few months. "I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly will show the rapid trajectory we're on," he said on a call with investors in January. A Meta spokesperson said in a statement: "As we've said publicly, our next model will be good but, more importantly, show the rapid trajectory we're on, and then we'll steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models. We're excited for people to see what we've been cooking very soon."

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An incident in Macau

A 70-year old woman in China loudly shouted at a robot to leave her alone, but the bot instead stood its ground and did a “raise the roof” move when the woman called it “freaking crazy.”…

And then they send victims to the legit VPN download to hide their tracks

A group of cybercriminals tracked as Storm-2561 is using fake enterprise VPN clients from CheckPoint, Cisco, Fortinet, Ivanti, and other vendors to steal users' credentials, according to Microsoft.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Pitchfork: Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Justice and Live Nation reached a settlement in the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against the concert giant. During the trial, which lasted only a week, representatives for Live Nation had moved to exclude a collection of Slack direct messages from 2022 between two of the company's regional directors from the evidence presented to the jury. Bloomberg and a number of other publications have, as of today (March 12), successfully petitioned New York federal judge Arun Subramanian to release the chats. The conversations are between Ben Baker, now head of ticketing for Venue Nation, and Jeff Weinhold, currently a senior director in the ticketing department. Baker and Weinhold joke about overcharging and price-gouging fans -- "Robbing them blind, baby," Baker brags in one exchange pertaining to a Kid Rock show in Tampa Bay -- as well as being able to raise prices on ancillary services such as parking seemingly at will. "These people are so stupid," Baker writes. "I almost feel bad taking advantage of them BAHAHAHAHAHA." Live Nation described the messages as "off-the-cuff banter, not policy, decision-making, or facts of consequence." In a statement the company has since added: "The Slack exchange from one junior staffer to a friend absolutely doesn't reflect our values or how we operate."

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Apple will cut its App Store commission in China from 30% to 25% starting March 15, with small-business and mini-app rates dropping from 15% to 12%. AppleInsider reports: Chinese regulators have been back and forth with Apple in recent years over the 30% App Store commission. The latest publicly known pressure occurred after President Trump slammed the country with seemingly random and outrageous tariffs in 2025. While nothing much else has happened in the public eye in the year since, Apple has announced a new commission rate via its developer blog. The new rates go into effect on March 15. The current standard 30% rate is dropping to 25% for in-app purchases and paid app transactions. The Small Business Program and Mini Apps Partner Program will see rates drop from 15% to 12%. That lower rate applies to auto-renewals of in-app purchase subscriptions after the first year. Mini Apps are for transactions found in super apps like those popularized in China. [...] Developers will need to sign the updated terms, but the new rates are applied automatically. It is unclear if these new changes will prevent regulatory action from China.

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Someone, somewhere, ticked a box on a build farm. The wait is over

Chrome is finally coming to ARM64 Linux devices, years after it turned up on macOS and Windows on Arm.…

Mr. Dollar Ton shares a report from the Guardian: Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software, according to south-east North Dakota news outlet InForum. Lipps told the outlet she had never been to North Dakota and did not commit the crimes. Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, said she has lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee. She had never been on an airplane until authorities flew her to North Dakota last year to face charges. In July, U.S. marshals arrested Lipps at her Tennessee home while she was babysitting four children. She said she was taken away at gunpoint and booked into a county jail as a fugitive from justice from North Dakota. "I've never been to North Dakota, I don't know anyone from North Dakota," Lipps told WDAY News. She remained in a Tennessee jail for nearly four months without bail while awaiting extradition. She was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. According to Fargo police records obtained by WDAY News, detectives investigating bank fraud cases in April and May 2025 reviewed surveillance video of a woman using a fake U.S. army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars. The officers allegedly used facial recognition software to identify the suspect as Lipps. A detective reportedly wrote in court documents that Lipps appeared to match the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle. Lipps told WDAY News that no one from the Fargo police department contacted her before the arrest. Lipps is now back home but says the experience has had lasting consequences. While jailed and unable to pay bills, Lipps lost her home, her car and her dog, she said. She also told WDAY News no one from the Fargo police department had apologized.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Milan prosecutors have requested trial for Amazon's European unit and four of its managers over alleged tax evasion worth around $1.38 billion, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said on Thursday. The move is unprecedented for a case of this kind in Italy, as Amazon agreed in December to pay 527 million euros, including interest, to Italy's Revenue Agency to settle the tax dispute. In all previous cases involving other international groups, once a settlement was reached and payment made, prosecutors closed related criminal investigations, either through plea deals or by dropping the cases. This time, however, Milan prosecutors did not share the tax authority's approach and decided to press ahead with their probe, leading to a request that the suspects be sent to trial. After December's tax settlement, Amazon said it would "forcefully defend its position on the potential ungrounded criminal case." It added: "Unpredictable regulatory environments, disproportionate penalties, and protracted legal proceedings are increasingly affecting Italy's attractiveness as an investment destination." Under what's described as a "VAT-avoidance algorithm," prosecutors accuse Amazon and four managers of enabling large-scale VAT evasion on goods sold in Italy between 2019 and 2021, allowing tens of thousands of non-EU marketplace sellers to sell goods in the country without clearly disclosing their identities. They allege that this helped the sellers avoid paying value-added tax. "Under Italian law, an intermediary offering goods for sale in Italy is jointly responsible for unpaid VAT by non-EU sellers operating through its platform," notes Reuters.

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PAC chair asks Cabinet Office if anyone bothered telling dept about the shambles before handing over the keys

The chair of the UK Parliament's public spending watchdog has dubbed the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) decision to award Capita a £370 million shared service contract "extraordinary," given the outsourcing firm's "failings" in supporting the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS).…

35-year staffer comes from time before company's cloud and Copilot obsessions

Microsoft Executive Vice President (EVP) for Experiences and Devices, Rajesh Jha, is retiring from Microsoft after more than 35 years at the Redmond grindstone.…

Gets bounced between Microsoft and Anthropic like a support ticket nobody wants to own

Companies using credits bundled with Microsoft for Startups have found some unwelcome surprises on their credit card statements after deploying Anthropic's Claude via Azure AI Foundry.…

Zram versus zswap – two ways to get a quart into a pint pot

Linux has two ways to do memory compression – zram and zswap – but you rarely hear about the second. The Register compares and contrasts them.…

'When we tank the vehicle ... I would like it to be on a day that we could actually launch'

NASA has set April 1 for the Artemis II launch, with engineers preparing the Space Launch System (SLS) for a rollout to the pad on March 19.…

Operation Synergia's third season is the most productive to date

Ninety-four people were arrested as part of a global, multi-month cybercrime crackdown, Interpol revealed today.…

Age-verification laws target operating systems because apparently teenagers having root access is now a safeguarding crisis

Opinion A new wave of age verification laws requires kids and teenagers to register before they can use a computer.…

It wants 'safe, cost effective, and rapid.' We say: 'Good, fast, cheap – you can have 2'

Britain's government is pushing ahead with nuclear planning and regulatory reforms, aiming to accelerate atomic projects that will power homes and datacenters.…

Take your YOLO and box it up

exclusive NanoClaw, an open source agent platform, can now run inside Docker Sandboxes, furthering the project's commitment to security.…

Skia graphics lib and V8 JavaScript engine brings browser's tally of actively exploited bugs to three in 2026

Google has pushed out an emergency Chrome update to fix two previously unknown vulnerabilities that attackers were already exploiting before the patches landed.…

Grappling with UK trains will send humans into Recovery too sometimes

Bork!Bork!Bork! Today we visit the south of England, where Windows has fallen over, briefly granting unrestricted rail travel to one and all.…

Early benchmarks show the A18 Pro-powered MacBook Neo beating every current x86 CPU in single-core Cinebench performance, including chips from Intel and AMD. Notebookcheck reports: We have performed a couple of benchmarks and were particularly impressed by the single-core performance. Not in the short Geekbench test, but in Cinebench 2024, where a single-core test takes about 10 minutes. The A18 Pro consumes between 3.5-4 Watts in this scenario and scores 147 points. This means it is faster than every other x86 processor in our database, including the two desktop processors Intel Core Ultra 9 285K & AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This also means the MacBook Neo beats every modern mobile processor from AMD, Intel and also Qualcomm, even though the upcoming Snapdragon X2 chips should be a bit faster. The A18 Pro is also slightly faster than Apple's own M3 generation in this scenario. Further reading: ASUS Executive Says MacBook Neo is 'Shock' to PC Industry

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