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Software vendors keen to monetize AI should tread cautiously, since they risk inflating costs for their customers without delivering any promised benefits such as reducing employee head count. From a report: The latest report from McKinsey & Company mulls what software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors need to do to navigate the minefield of hype that surrounds AI and successfully fold such capabilities into their offerings. According to the consultancy, there are three main challenges it identifies as holding back broader growth in AI software monetization in the report. One of these is simply the inability to show any savings that can be expected. Many software firms trumpet potential use cases for AI, but only 30 percent have published quantifiable return on investment from real customer deployments. Meanwhile, many customers see AI hiking IT costs without being able to offset these by slashing labor costs. The billions poured into developing AI models mean they don't come cheap, and AI-enabling the entire customer service stack of a typical business could lead to a 60 to 80 percent price increase, McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet." Another challenge is scaling up adoption after introduction, which the report blames on underinvestment in change management. It says that for every $1 spent on model development, firms should expect to have to spend $3 on change management, which means user training and performance monitoring. The third issue is a lack of predictable pricing, which means that customers find it hard to forecast how their AI costs will scale with usage because the pricing models are often complex and opaque.

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Analyst predicts over-supply will trigger a market correction in favor of deep-pocketed incumbents

Gartner has signaled that the supply of "agentic AI" in terms of models, platforms, and products far outstrips demand, creating a situation that will lead to consolidation and market correction.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: China's giant solar parks aren't just changing the power mix -- they may be changing the ground beneath them. Fresh field data point to cooler soils, extra moisture, and pockets of greening, though lasting ecological shifts will hinge on design and long-term care. [...] A team studying one of the largest photovoltaic parks in China, the Gonghe project in the Talatan Desert, found a striking difference between what was happening under the panels and what lay just beyond. They used a detailed framework measuring dozens of indicators -- everything from soil chemistry to microbial life -- and discovered that the micro-environment beneath the panels was noticeably healthier. The reasons track with physics: shade cools the surface and slows evaporation, letting scarce soil moisture linger longer; field experiments in western China report measurable soil-moisture gains beneath shaded arrays. Simple shade from panel rows can create a gentler microclimate at ground level, cutting wind stress and helping fragile seedlings establish. In other desert locations like Gansu and the Gobi, year-round field data tell a similar story. Soil temperatures beneath arrays tend to be cooler during the day and a bit warmer at night than surrounding ground, with humidity patterns shifting in tandem -- conditions that can make harsh surfaces more habitable when paired with basic land care. Even small shifts like these can help re-establish vegetation -- if combined with erosion control and water management. These aren't wildflowers blooming overnight, but they are signs that utility-scale solar can double as a modest micro-restorer.

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Coin toss odds for spotting a deepfake, study finds. And that's before the machines learn to sing

Think you can distinguish between a human voice and a robot? Think again, because the numbers are starting to say otherwise. …

Independent technical governance will hope to unite fractured ecosystem

Meta will contribute React, React Native, and JSX (JavaScript XML) to a new React Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, and said that "it is important that no single company or organization is overrepresented."…

New laws restrict goods that are manufactured outside of China

China is hitting back at US export restrictions with some of its own, tightening its control on so-called rare earth minerals and introducing laws that require companies to get licenses before they can ship goods containing rare earths, even those made outside of the country.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: A website set up by an unknown Dane over the course of one weekend in August is giving a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online. The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) -- a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance. The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it to national government officials, members of the European Parliament and others with ease. Since launching, it has broken the inboxes of MEPs and caused a stir in Brussels' corridors of power. "We are getting hundreds per day about it," said Evin Incir, a Swedish Socialists and Democrats MEP, of the email deluge.

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Meanwhile, Microsoft resurrects Edit and kills .NET 3.5 SP1 on demand

It's taken a while, but Microsoft has finally made its redesigned Start menu available to Canary Channel Windows Insiders, while also removing .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a Feature On Demand, and adding Edit, the command-line text editor.…

The Bank of England has warned there is a growing risk of a "sudden correction" in global markets as it raised concerns about soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies. From a report: Policymakers said there were also threats of a "sharp repricing of US dollar assets" if the Federal Reserve lost credibility in the eyes of global investors. It comes as Donald Trump's continues to attack the US central bank and threaten its independence. Continued hype and optimism about the potential for AI technology has led to a rise in valuations in recent months, with companies such as OpenAI now worth $500 billion, compared with $157 billion last October. Another firm, Anthropic, has almost trebled its valuation, going from $60 billion in March to $170 billion last month. However, the Bank of England's financial policy committee (FPC) warned on Wednesday: "The risk of a sharp market correction has increased. "On a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence. This ... leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic." It said investors had not fully accounted for these potential risks, warning that "a sudden correction could occur" should any of them crystallise, resulting in finance drying up for households and businesses. The FPC added: "As an open economy with a global financial centre, the risk of spillovers to the UK financial system from such global shocks is material."

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This time outage was not actually Microsoft's fault

If you struggled to access the Azure Portal or Microsoft Entra this morning, you weren't alone – Microsoft has blamed a Kubernetes crash for the outage.…

Court says ICO can chase US outfit for unlawfully hoovering up Brits' selfies

The UK General Regulatory Chamber's Upper Tribunal (UT) has ruled in favor of the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which appealed against a 2023 decision that it could not fine Clearview AI over GDPR violations.…

Affects users regardless of when their backups were created

SonicWall has admitted that all customers who used its cloud backup service to store firewall configuration files were affected by a cybersecurity incident first disclosed in mid-September, walking back earlier assurances that only a small fraction of users were impacted.…

Kevork Kechichian says x86 giant's contributions should benefit Intel first

Over the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant's new leadership.  …

Notebook chip promises 8 to16 cores and up to 180 TOPS of total AI performance when it hits shelves in January

Intel has begun clawing back production from TSMC with the introduction of its Panther Lake processors, the company's first chip based on its long-awaited 18A process tech.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Discord has identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of a customer service data breach announced last week, spokesperson Nu Wexler tells The Verge. A tweet by vx-underground said that the company was being extorted over a breach of its Zendesk instance by a group claiming to have "1.5TB of age verification related photos. 2,185,151 photos." In its announcement last week, Discord said that information like names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit cards, and IP addresses also may have been impacted by the breach. "All affected users globally have been contacted and we continue to work closely with law enforcement, data protection authorities, and external security experts," said Wexler. "We've secured the affected systems and ended work with the compromised vendor. We take our responsibility to protect your personal data seriously and understand the concern this may cause."

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Japanese tech goliath gets grabby with industrial automation as ABB shelves spin-off plans

SoftBank Group has added more arms to its portfolio, this time of the robotic kind.…

Blames 'lack of interest' from the EU policy enforcer for towel throwing

Nextcloud has withdrawn a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission over OneDrive bundling, citing a lack of progress with the governing body.…

It's the end of support as we know it and users feel fine

With days to go before Microsoft finally pulls the plug on Windows 10 support, there are hundreds of millions of computers that have yet to upgrade to Windows 11, despite the best efforts of hardware manufacturers and the operating system's marketers.…

China-linked snoops crack email at DC powerhouse that represented Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Holmes

Washington's elite law firm Williams & Connolly has confirmed that attackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability to access a handful of attorney email accounts in what it believes was a nation-state-linked cyberattack.…

After failed negotiations with publishers, Belgium's copyright enforcement agency has ordered the Internet Archive to block access to specific books in its Open Library within Belgium or face a 500,000-euro fine. TorrentFreak reports: Back in July, the Brussels Business Court issued a sweeping ex parte site-blocking order targeting several "shadow libraries" including Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Z-Library. Unusually, the order also included the Internet Archive's Open Library, a project operated by the well-known U.S. non-profit organization Internet Archive. The order was granted based on a request from publishers and authors who claimed, among other things, that the operators of the targeted sites were difficult to identify. This also applied to the Internet Archive, which was not heard by the court before the order was issued. [...] Over the past several weeks, Internet Archive attempted to reach an agreement with the publishers, but the effort was unsuccessful. It is clear, however, that the Internet Archive believes that its use of copyrighted books for the Open Library qualifies as fair use. The organization is known to purchase physical copies, which it then digitizes to lend out to patrons, one copy at a time. This self-digitizing project was previously contested in a U.S. federal court, where the publishers ultimately came out as the winner. They argued that the Internet Archive project competed with their own licensing business for book lending. The detailed arguments at the center of the Belgian case are not public, but after hearing both sides, the Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright concluded that Internet Archive must take action. In a follow-up decision (PDF) published last week, the government department explicitly states that it can't rule on U.S. fair use or the Belgian equivalent, but concludes that self-blocking measures are warranted. The Internet Archive hosts the contested books and has the ability to render them inaccessible. If it refuses to do so, it may be considered a copyright infringer under local law. The final decision requires the rightsholders to supply the Internet Archive with a list of all books that should be blocked in Belgium. The non-profit then has 20 calendar days to implement the necessary measures. In addition to making the books unavailable, Internet Archive must also prevent these works from being made available for digital lending in the future.

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