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Apple's iPhone and iPad running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer mobile devices cleared for NATO-restricted classified data. No special software or settings are required. MacRumors reports: Apple's devices are the first and only consumer mobile products that have reached this government certification level after security testing and evaluation by the German government. iPhones and iPads running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 are now certified for use with classified data in all NATO nations. In an announcement of the security clearance, Apple touted its security features: "Apple designs security into all of its products from the start, ensuring the most sophisticated protections are built in across hardware, software, and Apple silicon. This unique approach allows Apple users to benefit from industry-leading security protections such as best-in-class encryption, biometric authentication with Face ID, and groundbreaking features like Memory Integrity Enforcement. These same protections are now recognized as meeting stringent government and international security requirements, even for restricted data."

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Mozilla has released Firefox 148 for Windows, macOS and Linux, bringing a new AI Settings section that lets users disable all of the browser's AI-powered features in one click and then selectively re-enable the ones they actually want, such as the local translation tool that works locally rather than in the cloud. The update also patches more than 50 security vulnerabilities -- none known to be under active exploitation -- over half of which Mozilla classifies as high risk, including five sandbox escape flaws and eight use-after-free bugs in the JavaScript engine that could allow code execution.

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Speaking of the Citrini's blog post, which imagines a near-future AI-driven economic collapse, and which ended up help triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly two weeks on Monday, FT Alphaville decided to track how US stock markets have moved on the release days of notable dystopian speculative fiction throughout history. The story adds: You may contend that this is facile. We would agree. You might contend that the comparisons make no sense because it's possible to read a blog post during a single work shift, but it's tricker to complete a whole novel (or sneak out to watch a movie). We would contend: do you really think traders read? Let's begin. The methodology -- tracking S&P 500 daily moves for post-1986 releases and DJIA moves for pre-1986 ones -- crowned The Matrix as the all-time leader, its March 1999 US debut coinciding with a 1.11% drop in the index. Citrini's "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" came in a close second at -1.04%. On the positive end, the 2013 release of Her, a film about a man falling in love with an AI agent, coincided with the largest gain in the set at +1.66%.

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Pretending the software is sentient makes it sound more powerful

As with any piece of obsolete software, you might expect an outdated AI model to just be switched off. Anthropic, however, argues that simply pulling the plug has downsides. After “retirement” interviews, Claude Opus 3 said it wanted to keep sharing its “musings,” so Anthropic suggested a blog.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations. Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on. "FPDS may have been a little clunky, but its simple, old-school interface made it extremely functional and robust. Every facet of government operations touches on contracting at one point, and this was the first tool that many investigative journalists and researchers would reach for to quickly find out what the government is buying and who is selling it, and how these contracts all fit together," Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me.

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A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% -- its worst single-day fall since August 2023 -- on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian developers to the price of electricity. The index has shed more than $68 billion in market value in February alone, its worst month since 2003. But the core claim that India's entire $205 billion software export industry rests on cheap labor is roughly 15 years out of date, an analysis argues, custom application maintenance alone accounts for about 35% of a typical Indian IT firm's revenue, per HSBC, and enterprise platforms require deterministic outputs that probabilistic AI systems cannot wholesale replace. HSBC estimates gross AI-led revenue deflation for the sector at 14-16%, a measured headwind rather than an extinction event. The story adds: 24 years of software export data that has never posted a decline, $200 billion in annual revenue, partnerships with the very AI labs whose products are supposed to be the instrument of the sector's destruction, possibly a new $1.5 trillion market category emerging at the intersection of services and software, and the largest U.S. corporates in the middle of mapping their entire workforces into process architectures that require technology partners to modernise. I think India's IT is going to be fine.

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New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users "pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value." From a report: While many randomized video game loot boxes have drawn attention and regulation from various government bodies in recent years, the New York suit calls out Valve's system specifically for "enabl[ing] users to sell the virtual items they have won, either through its own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, or through third-party marketplaces." The vast majority of Valve's in-game loot boxes contain skins that can only be resold for a few cents, the suit notes, while the rarest skins can be worth thousands of dollars through marketplaces on and off of Steam. That fits the statutory definition of gambling as "charging an individual for a chance to win something of value based on luck alone," according to the suit. The Steam Wallet funds that users get through directly reselling skins "have the equivalent purchasing power on the Steam platform as cash," the suit notes. But if a user wants to convert those Steam funds to real cash, they can do so relatively easily by purchasing a Steam Deck and reselling it to any interested party, as an investigator did while preparing the lawsuit.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called "Patty," is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for "friendliness." Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, tells The Verge that the company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as "welcome to Burger King," "please," and "thank you." Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness. "This is all meant to be a coaching tool," Roux says, adding that the company is "iterating" on capturing the tone of conversations as well.

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Report claims more vulnerabilities created than fixed as remediation gap widens

Veracode has posted its annual State of Software Security report, based on data from 1.6 million applications tested on its cloud platform, finding that more vulnerabilities are being created than are being fixed, and that high-velocity development with AI is making comprehensive security unattainable.…

HBO Max will be cracking down on password sharing around the world. From a report: The streamer first started cracking down on password sharing in the United States late last August. Subscribers are now able to add an additional out-of-household account for $7.99 a month. Before that August change, Warner Bros. Discovery had been testing for months to determine who may or may not be a "legitimate user," as CEO and President for Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming and Games JB Perrette described the plan. On Thursday during the company's fourth quarter earnings call for 2025, WBD revealed that the streaming limitations would be expanding. This news came as part of an answer about which levers the company plans to pull to grow HBO Max. Password crackdowns have proven to be a lucrative way to both boost revenue and subscriptions. Netflix, for example, saw 9 million more subscribers after its first wave of password crackdowns in 2024. The caveat is that password crackdowns do not lead to consistent growth, and they often infuriate subscribers.

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TrendForce says eight hyperscalers are set to pour $710B into servers and infrastructure

The big cloud operators are ramping up investment in AI servers and infrastructure to meet demand for AI development and deployment, exacerbating the memory shortage caused by their insatiable growth.…

Whac-A-Mole season continues as Redmond finds yet another corner to stuff its 21st century Clippy

Microsoft has announced that its Edge browser will automatically open the Copilot side pane when users open links from Outlook.…

EBay is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its full-time employees, saying the layoffs are needed to align its workforce with strategic priorities. From a report: "We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce," the San Jose, California-based company said early Thursday in a statement. "We are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect." EBay will continue to hire in key areas. The cuts come a week after the company said it would acquire secondhand fashion marketplace Depop for about $1.2 billion in an effort to draw younger shoppers and after it reported robust quarterly results. Revenue increased 15% to $3 billion in the fourth quarter, surpassing analyst estimates.

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Telegram posts promise up to $1,000 per call as gang refines IT helpdesk ruse

Prolific cybercrime crew Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH) is reportedly recruiting women in the hope of improving its social engineering success.…

Report highlights too many firsts in Artemis III mission

The latest report from NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) raises questions about the mission objectives for Artemis III.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn't definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus -- negative net migration -- as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America's own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe. Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn't collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying, telecommuting and retiring overseas. The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there. In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language -- not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin's trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification. More than 100,000 young students are enrolled abroad for a more affordable university degree. In nursing homes mushrooming across the Mexican border, elderly Americans are turning up for low-cost care. [...] The U.S. experienced net negative migration -- an estimated loss of some 150,000 people -- in 2025, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank. The number could be larger or smaller because official U.S. data doesn't yet fully capture the number of people leaving, Brookings analysts noted. The total in-migration was between around 2.6 and 2.7 million in 2025, down from a peak of almost 6 million in 2023. The U.S. saw 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million "self-deportations" last year, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 15 countries providing full or partial 2025 data showed that at least 180,000 Americans joined them -- a number likely to be far higher when other countries report full statistics.

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A rare joint alert from all five spy agencies means serious business

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance is urgently warning defenders to patch two Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vulnerabilities used in attacks.…

Analyst warns soaring DRAM and NAND costs could push entry-level devices out of reach

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.…

Many dependent apps, including FreePascal and Lazarus, face the chop

Version 2 of the widely used Gtk toolkit will be dropped from the next Debian release. The problem is that many things still need it, including FreePascal and its Lazarus IDE.…

So say Oxford boffins who found 'bias' related to Apollo rock samples created false impression

Scientists at the University of Oxford say they may have cracked the puzzle of the Moon's magnetic field and settled a debate that has raged since the Apollo missions returned with rock samples.…