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We have one, yes – but what about a second death ray?

Still shopping for the perfect death ray, the US Army has tapped Huntington Ingalls to build and test a prototype laser weapon designed to fry drones in flight.…

Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai has warned of a potential bubble forming in data center construction, arguing that the pace of that buildout may outstrip initial demand for AI services. From a report: A rush by big tech firms, investment funds and other entities to erect server bases from the US to Asia is starting to look indiscriminate, the billionaire executive and financier said. Many of those projects are built without clear customers in mind, Tsai told the HSBC Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong Tuesday. "I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble," Tsai told delegates. Some of the envisioned projects commenced raising funds without having secured "uptake" agreements, he added. "I start to get worried when people are building data centers on spec. There are a number of people coming up, funds coming out, to raise billions or millions of capital." [...] At the same time, Tsai had choice words for his US rivals, particularly with their spending. "I'm still astounded by the type of numbers that's being thrown around in the United States about investing into AI," Tsai told the audience. "People are talking, literally talking about $500 billion, several 100 billion dollars. I don't think that's entirely necessary. I think in a way, people are investing ahead of the demand that they're seeing today, but they are projecting much bigger demand."

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User group chairman warns, however, that ERP giant's pace is not feasible for every org

Europe's German-speaking SAP user group is reporting a sharp uptick in organizations signing up or planning to sign up for the application vendor's preferred cloud migration route.…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes companies will eventually need fewer software engineers as AI continues to transform programming. "Each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers," Altman told Stratechery. AI now handles over 50% of code authorship in many companies, Altman estimated, a significant shift that's happened rapidly as large language models have improved. The real paradigm shift is still coming, he said. "The big thing I think will come with agentic coding, which no one's doing for real yet," Altman said, suggesting that the next breakthrough will be AI systems that can independently tackle larger programming tasks with minimal human guidance. While OpenAI continues hiring engineers for now, Altman recommended that high school graduates entering the workforce "get really good at using AI tools," calling it the modern equivalent of learning to code. "When I was graduating as a senior from high school, the obvious tactical thing was get really good at coding. And this is the new version of that," he said.

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Joe Tsai says speculative datacenter builds could exceed actual demand

Alibaba is warning of a datacenter spending "bubble" amid the rush to build infrastructure in anticipation of an AI feeding frenzy.…

Infinite Reality, a 3D technology company, has acquired Napster for $207 million, the companies announced Tuesday. The deal aims to transform the once-notorious music sharing service into a metaverse platform. Napster, launched in 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, was the first major peer-to-peer file-sharing application before legal battles forced its closure in 2001. Since 2016, it has operated as a subscription streaming service. Infinite Reality plans to create virtual 3D spaces where music fans can experience concerts together and artists can sell merchandise.

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Redmond veteran proposes Zero Sugar and Caffeine Free variants

Baffled by the plethora of Outlook options out there? You aren't alone. Microsoft veteran Scott Hanselman posted a list of some more variants that could be used to do the same thing.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: There are many stories of how artificial intelligence came to take over the world, but one of the most important developments is the emergence in 2012 of AlexNet, a neural network that, for the first time, demonstrated a huge jump in a computer's ability to recognize images. Thursday, the Computer History Museum (CHM), in collaboration with Google, released for the first time the AlexNet source code written by University of Toronto graduate student Alex Krizhevsky, placing it on GitHub for all to peruse and download. "CHM is proud to present the source code to the 2012 version of Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffery Hinton's AlexNet, which transformed the field of artificial intelligence," write the Museum organizers in the readme file on GitHub. Krizhevsky's creation would lead to a flood of innovation in the ensuing years, and tons of capital, based on proof that with sufficient data and computing, neural networks could achieve breakthroughs previously viewed as mainly theoretical. The Computer History Museum's software historian, Hansen Hsu, published an essay describing how he spent five years negotiating with Google to release the code.

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16,000 stolen records pertain to former and active mail subscribers

Infosec veteran Troy Hunt of HaveIBeenPwned fame is notifying thousands of people after phishers scooped up his Mailchimp mailing list.…

Thoughtful and considered … even if it is based on an American distro

EU OS is a proposal for an immutable KDE-based Linux distribution with a Windows-like desktop, designed for use in European public-sector organizations.…

'Don't wait for another pandemic or civil challenge,' says US spy-tech biz

Comment It might take a particularly shameless company to grasp the opportunity presented by the UK's coronavirus pandemic and step in with a sales pitch. US spy-tech biz Palantir is willing to give it a go.…

Microsoft and Dell keeping quiet on their work-life-balance trials

A four-day working week pilot programme is being squarely aimed at the UK tech sector with the final results to be assessed by academics.…

Firefly Aerospace has teamed up with Blue Origin's Honeybee Robotics unit to deploy a rover on its 2028 lunar mission to study the Gruithuisen Domes -- rare volcanic formations that may reveal insights into the moon's geology and potential resources. The announcement follows Firefly's successful Blue Ghost Mission 1, which outlasted all prior commercial lunar landings. Reuters reports: The Gruithuisen Domes, located on the moon's near side, are unusual volcanic formations believed to be rich in silica -- a composition rare on the lunar surface -- and studying them could unlock clues about the moon's geological history and potential resources for future human missions. [...] The upcoming mission, part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, will use Firefly's Blue Ghost lander and Elytra Dark orbital vehicle, alongside the Honeybee Robotics rover, to explore the domes, building on the success of its debut effort, Firefly said.

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Other cities either started with rival kit, or had Chinese vendor core already built before any bans, says expert

Interview Recent research found that London is ranked at the foot of the table when it comes to 5G mobile service, but why should that be? The answer is a combination of issues, including available spectrum, investment and the great Huawei replacement.…

Just an FYI, like

Generative AI assistants packaged up as browser extensions harvest personal data with minimal safeguards, researchers warn.…

There's only one rule – don't attack Russia, duh

Check Point has spotted a fresh ransomware-as-a-service crew in town: VanHelsing, touting a cross-platform locker targeting Microsoft Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi systems, among others. But so far, only Windows machines have fallen victim, we're told.…

NASA's Curiosity rover has detected the largest organic molecules ever found on Mars -- decane, undecane, and dodecane -- suggesting that complex prebiotic chemistry may have occurred in the planet's ancient lakebeds. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From a press release: Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mini-lab and found the molecules decane, undecane, and dodecane. These compounds, which are made up of 10, 11, and 12 carbons, respectively, are thought to be the fragments of fatty acids that were preserved in the sample. Fatty acids are among the organic molecules that on Earth are chemical building blocks of life. Living things produce fatty acids to help form cell membranes and perform various other functions. But fatty acids also can be made without life, through chemical reactions triggered by various geological processes, including the interaction of water with minerals in hydrothermal vents. While there's no way to confirm the source of the molecules identified, finding them at all is exciting for Curiosity's science team for a couple of reasons. Curiosity scientists had previously discovered small, simple organic molecules on Mars, but finding these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry advanced toward the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars. The new study also increases the chances that large organic molecules that can be made only in the presence of life, known as "biosignatures," could be preserved on Mars, allaying concerns that such compounds get destroyed after tens of millions of years of exposure to intense radiation and oxidation.

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Time to update your firmware, if you can, to one with the security fixes, cough cough

DrayTek router owners in the UK and beyond had a pretty miserable weekend after some ISPs began to notice a lot of their customers' gateways going offline.…

‘It's just pure incompetence’ confesses penguin emperor

Linux kernel development boss Linus Torvalds has admitted his own “pure incompetence” led him to forget to deliver version 6.14 of the project.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: German software company SAP overtook Danish healthcare company Novo Nordisk as Europe's largest company by market capitalization on Monday. At 0900 GMT, SAP had a market cap of $340 billion, slightly more than Novo Nordisk, according to Reuters calculations using LSEG Workspace data. SAP is Europe's largest software maker, providing business application software used by companies for finance, sales, supply chain and other functions. Its shares have surged in recent years, in part due to optimism that its cloud business will be a major beneficiary of recent investment in generative artificial intelligence. While SAP shares are up 7% so far in 2025, underperforming the broader European STOXX 600 index, which is up 8.3% year-to-date, they have clocked a total return of 160% since the end of 2022, far outperforming the STOXX 600's 28%. In contrast, Novo Nordisk shares have underperformed the market in recent months after data from trials of its experimental next-generation obesity drug Cagrisema disappointed investors.

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