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Singapore has claimed the top spot in the 2025 Global Talent Competitiveness Index for the first time, displacing Switzerland from a position the European nation had held since the ranking's inception in 2013. The index, produced by business school INSEAD and the Portulans Institute, measured 135 economies across 77 indicators spanning soft skills, AI talent concentration, and formal education systems. The city-state ranked first globally in formal education and what the report calls "Generalist Adaptive Skills," a category covering soft skills, digital literacy, and innovation-oriented thinking. A key factor in Singapore's rise was a seven-place jump in talent retention, moving from 38th to 31st. The United States fell from third place in 2023 to ninth this year, its weakest showing in 12 years, due to declines in openness and lifelong learning metrics. High-income European countries continue to dominate the top ten, holding seven positions.

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European leaders have spent years warning that the continent risked falling behind the U.S., China and Russia in the global contest for economic, technological and military dominance, and officials now believe they have reached that point. The mood darkened over the summer when Europe found itself on the sidelines as Washington and Beijing negotiated a reset of global trade rules, and turned bleak this month when the White House presented a Ukraine cease-fire plan without consulting European capitals. In July, the EU accepted a trade deal allowing the U.S. to impose 15% tariffs without retaliation. President Trump ignored European calls to pressure Moscow before meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August, telling reporters "this is not to do with Europe, Europe's not telling me what to do." Germany has eased its debt brake to pour $580 billion into a decade-long rearmament program, and the EU has set a 2030 rearmament goal -- defense spending across the region is set to exceed $560 billion this year, double what it was a decade ago. "Battle lines for a new world order, based on power, are being drawn right now," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in September. "A new Europe must emerge."

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Apple's Podcasts app on both iOS and Mac has been exhibiting strange behavior for months, spontaneously launching and presenting users with obscure religion, spirituality and education podcasts they never subscribed to -- and at least one of these podcasts contains a link attempting a cross-site scripting attack, 404 Media reports. Joseph Cox, a journalist at the outlet, documented the issue after repeatedly finding his Mac had launched the Podcasts app on its own, presenting bizarre podcasts with titles containing garbled code, external URLs to Spotify and Google Play, and in one case, what appears to be XSS attack code embedded directly in the podcast title itself. Patrick Wardle, a macOS security expert and creator of Objective-See, confirmed he could replicate similar behavior: simply visiting a website can trigger the Podcasts app to open and load an attacker-chosen podcast without any user prompt or approval. Wardle said this creates "a very effective delivery mechanism" if a vulnerability exists in the Podcasts app, and the level of probing suggests adversaries are actively evaluating it as a potential target. The XSS-attempting podcast dates from around 2019. A recent review in the app asked "How does Apple allow this attempted XSS attack?" Asked for comment five times by 404 Media, Apple did not respond.

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Roscosmos confirms structural damage as images suggest repairs could stretch into 2027

The pad used by Russia to send Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) sustained damange during yesterday's crew launch, according to Roscosmos.…

Australia's streaming quotas have become law. Legislation requiring the likes of Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max to spend a portion of their local earnings on original Australian content has been passed in parliament, and now comes into effect. From a report: The quotas were announced earlier this month. This will see global streamers with more than one million Australian subscribers made to spend 10% of their total Australian expenditure -- or 7.5% of their revenues -- on local originals, whether they are dramas, children's shows, docs, or arts and educational programs. Failing to comply with the rules will see streamers fined up to ten times their annual revenues in Australia. This is more than what broadcasters are liable for if they breach their quota rules laws. Streamers will be given three years to get their production operations in line. Streamers have long opposed government-set quotas and content levies, arguing they already meaningfully invest in the production sectors of the countries in which they operate. Producers, in general, have welcomed the systems, but remain wary that they could push streaming services out of their countries.

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Automation flaw in CI/CD workflow let a bad pull request unleash worm into npm

PostHog says the Shai-Hulud 2.0 npm worm compromise was "the largest and most impactful security incident" it's ever experienced after attackers slipped malicious releases into its JavaScript SDKs and tried to auto-loot developer credentials.…

China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year -- nearly nine times as many as the United States and more than the rest of the world combined -- as the country races to automate its manufacturing base amid rising labor costs at home and tariff threats from abroad. The nation's stock of operational robots surpassed 2 million in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Of 131 factories globally recognized by the World Economic Forum for boosting productivity through cutting-edge technologies like AI, 45 are in mainland China compared to three in the US. At Midea's washing machine factory in Jingzhou, an AI "factory brain" manages 14 virtual agents that coordinate robots and machines on the floor. The home-appliance giant reports that its revenue per employee grew nearly 40% between 2015 and 2024, and processes that once took 15 minutes now take 30 seconds. Down jacket maker Bosideng has cut sample production time from 100 days to 27 days using AI design tools, reducing development costs by 60%. At the port of Tianjin, scheduling that previously required 24 hours now takes 10 minutes, and 88% of large container equipment is automated. The port's operator says it requires 60% fewer workers than traditional facilities.

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Crims claim to know which customers are marked 'vulnerable'

British telco Brsk is investigating claims that it was attacked by cybercriminals who made off with more than 230,000 files.…

Project cites fears of state access as cloud sovereignty row deepens

French cloud outfit OVHcloud took another hit this week after GrapheneOS, a mobile operating system, said it was ditching the company's servers over concerns about France's approach to digital privacy.…

If that's a step too far, then there are new versions of CDE – and tmux

The oldest of the open source Linux desktops is planning its final steps away from X11, while an even older Unix desktop is getting freshened up.…

Researchers at the Pacific Institute documented 420 water-related conflicts globally in 2024, a record that far surpasses the 355 incidents logged in 2023 and continues a trend that has seen such violence more than quadruple over the past five years. The Oakland-based water think tank's database tracks disputes where water triggered violence, where water systems were targeted, and where infrastructure became collateral damage in broader conflicts. The Middle East reported the most incidents at 138, including 66 tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli military destroyed more than 30 wells in Rafah and Khan Yunis, and there were numerous reports of settlers destroying pipelines and tanks in the West Bank. The Russia-Ukraine war accounted for 51 incidents, including strikes that disrupted water service in Ukrainian cities.

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Pushes semiconductor familiarity via chip-shaped edible squares

SK hynix has launched HBM-themed square corn snacks at 7-Eleven, because nothing explains bandwidth like carbs and chocolate.…

An analysis of submissions to next year's International Conference on Learning Representations has found that roughly one in five peer reviews were fully generated by AI, a discovery that came after researchers including Carnegie Mellon's Graham Neubig grew suspicious of feedback on their manuscripts that seemed unusually verbose and requested non-standard statistical analyses. Neubig posted on X offering a reward for anyone who could scan the conference's submissions for AI-generated text, and Max Spero, CEO of detection tool developer Pangram Labs, responded the next day. Pangram screened all 19,490 studies and 75,800 peer reviews submitted to ICLR 2026, finding that 21% of reviews were fully AI-generated and more than half showed signs of AI use. The conference had permitted AI tools for polishing text but prohibited falsified content. Each reviewer was assigned five papers to review in two weeks on average -- a load that senior programme chair Bharath Hariharan described as "much higher than what has been done in the past."

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Training outfit scrambles to fix all-male lineup before December kickoff

Cybersecurity training provider TryHackMe is scrambling to recruit women infosec pros to help with its Christmas challenge following backlash concerning a lack of gender diversity.…

Nvidia's accelerators look pricey, but bullion still wins on cost per ounce

For as long as I have been a reporter and analyst in the IT sector, November has always been supercomputing month. Way before there was a TOP500 ranking of supercomputers in June 1993 but just as I was leaving university, the first Supercomputing Conference was held in Orlando in 1988. And that November SC show set the cadence for high-performance computing for the decades that followed.…

Another reason why the OS seems to swell with every update

Changing text in Microsoft Windows requires freezing string updates well before code changes stop, often leading to strange wording that persists for years.…

ChatGPT can browse the web, write code and analyze images, but ask it what time it is and you might get the correct answer, a confident wrong answer, or a polite refusal -- sometimes all three within minutes of each other. The problem stems from how large language models work. These systems predict answers based on training data and don't receive constant real-time updates about things like time unless they specifically search the internet. AI robotics expert Yervant Kulbashian told The Verge that a language model "is only referencing things that have entered this space," comparing it to a castaway on an island stocked with books but no watch. OpenAI can give ChatGPT access to system clocks, and does so through features like Search. But there are tradeoffs: every clock check consumes space in the model's context window, the finite portion of information it can hold at any given moment. Pasquale Minervini, a natural language processing researcher at the University of Edinburgh, said the leading models also struggle to read analog clock faces and have trouble with calendars.

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Ex-NCSC chief Ciaran Martin asked to examine how forecast ended up online ahead of schedule

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has drafted in former National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) chief Ciaran Martin to sniff out how its Budget day forecast wandered onto the open internet before the Chancellor had even reached the dispatch box.…

OBR says the scheme will cost £600M a year with no identified savings

The UK government has finally put a £1.8 billion price tag on its digital ID plans – days after the minister responsible refused to name a figure.…

Amazon Web Services has rolled out a DNS resilience feature that allows customers to make domain name system changes within 60 minutes of a service disruption in its US East region, a direct response to the long history of outages at the cloud giant's most troubled infrastructure. AWS said customers in regulated industries like banking, fintech and SaaS had asked for additional capabilities to meet business continuity and compliance requirements, specifically the ability to provision standby resources or redirect traffic during unexpected regional disruptions. The 60-minute recovery time objective still leaves a substantial window for outages to cascade, and the timing of the announcement -- less than six weeks after an October 20th DynamoDB incident and a subsequent VM problem drew criticism -- underscores how persistent US East's reliability issues have been.

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