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An anonymous reader shares a report: It is shocking but not surprising. Lightning crackles on Mars, scientists reported on Wednesday. What they observed, however, were not jagged, high-voltage bolts like those on Earth, arcing thousands of feet from cloud to ground. Rather, the phenomenon was more like the shock you feel when you scuff your feet on the carpet on a cold winter morning and then touch a metal doorknob. "This is like mini-lightning on Mars," Baptiste Chide, a scientist at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetary Science in Toulouse, France, said of the centimeter-scale electrical discharges. Dr. Chide and his colleagues reported the findings in a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The electrical sparks, although not as dramatically violent as on Earth, could play an important role in chemical reactions in the Martian atmosphere.

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GSMA says fragmented, poorly designed laws add burdens without making networks any safer

Mobile operators' core cybersecurity spending is projected to more than double by 2030 as threats evolve, while poorly designed and fragmented policy frameworks add extra compliance costs, according to industry group the GSMA.…

Dell has predicted PC sales will be flat next year, despite the potential of the AI PC and the slow replacement of Windows 10. From a report: "We have not completed the Windows 11 transition," COO Jeffrey Clarke said during Dell's Q3 earnings call on Tuesday. "In fact, if you were to look at it relative to the previous OS end of support, we are 10-12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were the previous generation." Clarke said that means 500 million PCs can't run Windows 11, while the same number didn't need an upgrade to handle Microsoft's latest desktop OS. The COO therefore predicted the PC market will "flourish," but then defined the word as meaning "roughly flat" sales despite Dell chalking up mid-to high single digits PC sales growth over the last year.

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Apple will retake its crown as the world's largest smartphone maker for the first time in more than a decade, lifted by the successful debut of a new iPhone series and a rush of consumers upgrading devices, according to Counterpoint Research. From a report: The iPhone 17 models introduced in September have been a hit both domestically in the US and in Apple's other critical market, China. They've enticed more people to upgrade, leading to double-digit year-over-year sales growth in both markets, according to the researchers. The US company also is benefiting from a cooling of US-China trade tensions and a depreciating dollar that has boosted purchases in emerging markets, they added. The growth will propel Apple past longtime rival Samsung this year, according to Counterpoint's figures. Shipments of the iPhone are set to grow at 10% in 2025, compared with 4.6% for Samsung.

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Engineer bends layout tool into vector renderer, then pushes frames through a MacBook's headphone jack

There's a certain delight to be had in doing something just to see if you can. Case in point: rendering Doom using PCB design software, or wading through the shores of Hell via the medium of an oscilloscope.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: AI is not a core part of operations at most of the world's central banks and digital assets are off the table, according to a survey released on Wednesday by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. The working group of 10 central banks from Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia managing roughly $6.5 trillion in assets also found that the institutions that have delved deepest so far into AI are the most cautious about the risks. The primary concern is that AI-driven behaviour could "accelerate future crises," the survey showed. "AI helps us see more, but decisions must remain with people," one participant was quoted as saying in the group's report. More than 60% of respondents said that AI tools - which have sparked layoffs already at technology companies and retail and investment banks - are not yet supporting core operations.

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The roughly 500 fiber-optic cables lying on the ocean floor carry more than 95% of all internet data -- not satellites, as many might assume -- and they face growing threats from natural disasters, terrorists and nation-states capable of disrupting global communications by dragging anchors or deploying submarines against the infrastructure. The cables are protected by layers of copper, steel, and plastics, but they remain vulnerable at multiple points: earthquakes can disturb them on the seafloor, and the connections where cables meet land-based infrastructure present targets for bad actors. National actors including Russia, China and the US possess the capability to attack these cables. A bipartisan Senate bill co-sponsored by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican John Barrasso is under consideration. The legislation would require a report to Congress within six months on Chinese and Russian sabotage efforts, mandate sanctions against foreign parties responsible for attacks, and direct the US to provide more resources for cable protection and repair.

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Regions across US affected, and one tore up its contract for the product

Towns and cities across the US are without access to their CodeRED emergency alert system following a cyberattack on vendor Crisis24.…

Service limits 20-ship line to two hulls after redesigns and delays torpedo schedule

The US Navy is scrapping an entire shipbuilding program in an effort to find alternatives that can be delivered faster to counter expected threats.…

Malaysia's Johor, one of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing data center hubs, has announced it will no longer approve applications for Tier 1 and Tier 2 data centers because of their enormous water consumption -- up to 50 million liters daily, or roughly 200 times what higher-tier facilities require. The Malaysian state has approved 51 data center projects as of November 2025. 17 centers are already operational, 11 are under construction and 23 received approval this year. The announcement follows concerns raised by a local politician who pointed to water supply disruptions in Georgia in the US after a data center began operations and protests in Uruguay over fears that data centers could affect farms.

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HR software vendor pushes cross-selling as modest workforce growth exposes vulnerability of per-seat pricing

Workday is confronting a troubling reality. Customers aren't hiring much and some are actively cutting staff. The solution? Cross-selling to squeeze more revenue per user out of its installed base.…

Texas has purchased $5 million worth of BlackRock's bitcoin ETF as an initial step toward creating the first state-level bitcoin reserve in the U.S. "[O]ther states having previously invested in such funds with public-employee retirement money," notes CoinDesk. "Michigan has been building such an investment, and Wisconsin sold its $350 million pension-fund stake in the BlackRock ETF in May. From the report: A few weeks ago, Texas moved past its deadline to "capture the industry's best practices so it can utilize these practices in the implementation and management" of its bitcoin BTC reserve, according to its formal request for information issued in September. Entities across the industry provided input on how it could set up and manage the stockpile conceived of in the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Investment Act. Last week, the state comptroller's office moved to secure $5 million in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) as a placeholder, a spokesman for the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts told CoinDesk on Tuesday. It's an opening move as the state continues to work toward a contract with a custodian, he said, which will take place after it develops its formal request for proposal.

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Gap threatens Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon despite optimistic forecasts of 3 billion ChatGPT users by 2030

OpenAI needs to secure $207 billion in new financing by 2030 to fulfill its expansion plans, according to HSBC Global Investment Research – a challenge that could ripple across Big Tech.…

Time to test just how far fandom and taste will stretch

If Xbox console prices are going to leave Santa short this year, fear not as an alternative is at hand - Xbox Crocs are here for $80.…

From nuclear weapons testing to climate modeling, nine new machines will give the US unprecedented computing firepower

Feature A silent arms race is accelerating in the world's most advanced laboratories. While headlines focus on chatbots and consumer AI, the United States is orchestrating something far more consequential: a massive expansion of supercomputing power that may reshape the future of science, security, and technological supremacy.…

Three boroughs confirm investigation amid service outages, disrupted phone lines, and limited online access

Two London councils are scrambling for answers after declaring a cybersecurity issue that began on Monday.…

Planned Snapdragon goes puff and disappears, but the code will survive

German Linux box vendor Tuxedo Computers has canned its long-planned Qualcomm device, citing numerous problems with the state of the Linux-on-Arm art.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Nearly a century ago, scientists proposed that a mysterious invisible substance they named dark matter clumped around galaxies and formed a cosmic web across the universe. What dark matter is made from, and whether it is even real, are still open questions, but according to a study, the first direct evidence of the substance may finally have been glimpsed. More work is needed to rule out less exotic explanations, but if true, the discovery would go down as a turning point in the decades-long search for the elusive substance that is said to make up 27% of the cosmos. "This could be a crucial breakthrough in unraveling the nature of dark matter," said Prof Tomonori Totani, an astrophysicist at the University of Tokyo, who said gamma rays emanating from the centre of the Milky Way appeared to bear the signature of the substance. [...] To search for potential dark matter signals, Totani analysed data from Nasa's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which detects the most energetic photons in the electromagnetic spectrum. He spotted a pattern of gamma rays that appeared to match the shape of the dark matter halo that spreads out in a sphere from the heart of the galaxy. The signal "closely matches the properties of gamma-ray radiation predicted to be emitted by dark matter," Totani told the Guardian. Details are published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. If Totani has seen dark matter at work, the observations suggest it is made from elementary particles 500 times more massive than the proton. But far more work is needed to rule out other astrophysical processes and background emissions that could explain the signals. Totani said the "decisive factor" would be detecting gamma rays with the same spectrum from other regions of space, such as dwarf galaxies. According to Prof Justin Read, an astrophysicist at the University of Surrey, the lack of significant signals from such galaxies strongly argues against Totani having seen gamma rays emitted from dark matter particle annihilation. Prof Kinwah Wu, a theoretical astrophysicist at UCL, urged caution, saying: "I appreciate the author's hard work and dedication, but we need extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim," he said. "This analysis has not reached this status yet. It is a piece of work which serves as an encouragement for the workers in the field to keep on pressing."

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Google Workspace switch drags on amid Excel dependencies, compliance requirements, and compatibility issues

Exclusive Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn't completed the switch.…

China launched an uncrewed Shenzhou 22 spacecraft to serve as an emergency lifeboat for three astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station after a docked return craft was found to have a cracked window likely caused by space debris. "A Long March 2F rocket fired its engines and lifted off with the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft, carrying cargo instead of a crew, at 11:11 pm EST Monday (04:11 UTC Tuesday)," reports Ars Technica. "The spacecraft docked with the Tiangong station nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth about three-and-a-half hours later." From the report: Chinese engineers worked fast to move up the launch of the Shenzhou 22, originally set to fly next year. On November 4, astronauts discovered one of the two crew ferry ships docked to the Tiangong station had a damaged window, likely from an impact with a small fragment of space junk. [...] Now, 20 days after the saga began, the Tiangong outpost again has a lifeboat for its long-term residents. Astronauts Zhang Lu, Fu Wei, and Zhang Hongzhang will return to Earth on the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft next year, soon after the arrival of their three replacements. The Tiangong astronauts will head outside the station on a spacewalk to inspect the damaged window on Shenzhou 20. Eventually, Shenzhou 20 will depart Tiangong and reenter the atmosphere with cargo. Assuming a smooth landing, Chinese engineers will have an opportunity to get a closer look at the damage on the ground to inform the design of future spacecraft. A preliminary assessment of the window indicates the crack is in the outermost layer of heat-insulating glass in Shenzhou 20's porthole window, according to Chinese state media. Engineers on the ground conducted simulations and wind tunnel ablation tests to determine whether the window might fail during reentry. "The results showed that the cracks would still propagate further," reported CCTV, China's government-run television network. "We held review meeting, and everyone agreed that ensuring the safe return of the astronauts was too risky with the glass damaged," Zhou said. While this crew is just one month into their planned six-month expedition, an emergency could force them to leave the station and return home at any time. Although remote, another collision with space junk, a major systems failure, or a medical emergency involving one of the astronauts could trigger an evacuation. That's why Chinese officials wanted to quickly launch Shenzhou 22 to give the crew a ticket home.The International Space Station follows the same policy, with SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft and Russian Soyuz ships serving as lifeboats until their crews' scheduled return to Earth.

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