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Company tries to curb strain by banning customer accounts for 'malicious' usage

Google customers paying $250 per month for AI Ultra subscriptions and less extravagant spenders have been surprised to find their accounts suspended for using the company's Antigravity agent development app and Gemini services with third-party agent tools like OpenClaw and OpenCode.…

Nv-based integrated graphics for Wintel box also in the works

Your next laptop may have Nvidia inside – not in the form of a GPU, but as a system on a chip, complete with CPU. Team Green could be chipping away at Intel's marketshare and giving people Arm-based systems that compete with Apple's MacBook line.…

Not the first of its kind

ai-pocalypse Anthropic sent the infosec community into a tizzy on Friday when it rolled out Claude Code Security, a new feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests patches to fix the issues.…

Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed," he wrote in the post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1. "We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers." Torvalds pointed out that the numbers he applies to new kernel releases are essentially meaningless. "We haven't done releases based on features (or on "stable vs unstable") for a long, long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we're somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It's the usual "solid progress" marker, nothing more.â He then reiterated his plan to end each series of kernels to end at x.19, before the next release becomes y.0 -- a process that takes about 3.5 years -- and then pondered what happens when the next version of Linux reaches a number he finds uncomfortable. "I don't have a solid plan for when the major number itself gets big," he admitted, "by that time, I expect that we'll have somebody more competent in charge who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens. So I'm not going to worry about it."

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Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writes. Companies like Reducto are now tackling the problem by segmenting pages into components -- headers, tables, charts -- before routing each to specialized parsing models, an approach borrowed from computer vision techniques used in self-driving vehicles. Researchers at Hugging Face recently found roughly 1.3 billion PDFs sitting in Common Crawl alone, and the Allen Institute for AI has noted that PDFs could provide trillions of novel, high-quality training tokens from government reports, textbooks, and academic papers -- the kind of data AI developers are increasingly desperate for.

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U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax -- prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday. Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using the same tactic, called distillation, to mimic OpenAI's products. Anthropic said distillation had legitimate uses -- companies use it to build smaller versions of their own products, for example -- but it could also be used to build competitive products "in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost." The scale of the different companies' distillation activity varied. DeepSeek engaged in 150,000 interactions with Claude, whereas Moonshot and MiniMax had more than 3.4 million and 13 million, respectively, Anthropic said.

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Russinovich and Hanselman say firms must train juniors to fix agent mistakes – not replace them with prompts

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base.…

Project ditches Swift and translates C++ with LLM assistance

The independent Ladybird web browser project is changing course on its choice of programming languages, with LLM-based coding assistants helping to evaluate the shift.…

The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa. Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its new diesel-electric vessel, the MV Maasvliet, and had already brought 1,012 kilometers of the cable to the Portuguese port of Leixoes by August. TAT-8, short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8, was built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, and hit full capacity within just 18 months of going live. A fault too expensive to repair took it out of service in 2002. The recovered cable is being shipped to Mertech Marine in South Africa, where it will be broken down into steel, copper, and two types of polyethylene -- all commercially valuable, especially the high-quality copper at a time when the International Energy Agency projects global shortages within a decade.

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Sending humans around the Moon in February, er, March - now April 2026, maybe

The quest to return to the Moon has hit another snag. NASA is delaying Artemis II again, as interrupted helium flow to the rocket’s upper stage forces a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and wipes out the March launch window.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter. The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Buyer interest in PayPal is still at a preliminary stage and may not lead to a transaction, the people cautioned. Founded in the late 1990s, PayPal was an early mover in the world of digital payments. But the company now finds itself in a rut with its customers increasingly turning to alternative ways to pay for things. PayPal's shares have fallen around 46% in New York trading over the last 12 months, giving the company a market value of about $38.4 billion.

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Watchdogs warn models that can generate realistic images of people must comply with data protection laws

A global coalition of privacy watchdogs has fired a warning shot at the generative AI industry, saying companies churning out realistic synthetic images can't pretend that data protection rules don't apply.…

Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius. Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a model that uses machine learning to optimize cloud parameters within traditional physics equations; it will be unveiled at a conference in Japan in March. Chris Bretherton at the Allen Institute for AI took a different path -- his ACE2 neural network, released in 2024, learns from 50 years of atmospheric data and largely bypasses physics equations altogether.

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A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers. The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345 adults in Indiana, aged 18 to 103. Nearly 29% of respondents reported at least one hassler in their close network. The biological toll varied by relationship type: hasslers who were family members showed the strongest and most consistent associations with accelerated aging, while spouse hasslers showed no significant effect on either epigenetic measure. The damage also went beyond aging clocks -- each additional hassler was associated with greater depression and anxiety severity, higher BMI, increased inflammation, and higher multimorbidity. When benchmarked against smoking, a major behavioral risk factor for aging, the hassler effect corresponded to roughly 13 to 17% of smoking's estimated impact on the same aging clocks.

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Goal is to run software locally and stream only to owners' computers

If the sour taste has still not left your mouth after Ring's Super Bowl ad, there is a $10,000 prize for anyone who can find a security flaw in the company's cameras.…

Complaints pile up from users after months of conversations disappear. Google insists it’s just a temporary bug

Over the past few days, complaints have stacked up from people who say months of conversations with Google's AI chatbot have simply vanished, with Reg readers noting the disappearances seemed to coincide with the rollout of Gemini 3.1.…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to compare it against humans. In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality." On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it "takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat" before a person gets smart -- and that on a per-query basis, AI has "probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis."

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Stations urged to mark milestone with pro-America content

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has called on broadcasters to start the day with the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance to celebrate the US's 250th birthday.…

The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero. The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly three-quarters of AI data center costs go toward computer chips and gear largely manufactured in Asia, and that spending gets subtracted from domestic output because it boosts foreign economies. Joseph Politano of the Apricitas Economics newsletter pegs AI's actual contribution at about 0.2 percentage points of the 2.2 percent U.S. growth in 2025, and even Hannah Rubinton at the St. Louis Fed -- whose own analysis attributed 39 percent of growth to AI-related business spending through the first nine months of the year -- acknowledges that figure is probably the ceiling. "It's not like AI is propping up the economy," Rubinton said.

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Business Secretary praises Doug Gurr's pro-growth agenda

Britain's competition regulator has tapped former Amazon UK chief Doug Gurr as preferred candidate for chair – a notable appointment given the watchdog's active investigations into major cloud providers.…