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With no hardware for sale and no local service agreement, SpaceX’s move looks more like politics than philanthropy

The US just invaded your country, kidnapped your president, and wants to take your oil. But good news, Venezuelans, Starlink claims you can get a month of free Internet, even though it doesn't say how that could work in a place where it doesn't offer service.…

Enterprises have been slow to adopt Arm laptops so far

Qualcomm is trying to become a major player in the laptop processor space. Its Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips, along with a concerted effort to improve the Windows on Arm software ecosystem, have made it a credible alternative to Intel and AMD, although it's still stuck at below 1% market share. On Monday at CES in Las Vegas, the company showed the next step in this strategy: the next-gen Snapdragon X2 Plus chips, which are targeted at budget and mainstream systems.…

US trade body threatens software and services market access unless European approach changes

The EU has pledged to stand firm against US threats following fines levied against Amercian tech companies for breaching recently introduced digital laws.…

The O-1B visa, a work permit reserved for individuals deemed to possess "extraordinary ability" in the arts, has become the pathway of choice for social media influencers and OnlyFans models seeking to build careers in the United States. Immigration attorneys told the Financial Times that influencers now make up more than half their clientele for O-1B applications, a shift that has accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic as lawyers and talent managers have adapted the visa's criteria -- originally designed for traditional artists -- to fit the metrics of online fame. High follower counts and substantial earnings can establish commercial success under the visa's requirements, landing a brand promotion contract can qualify as an endorsement of talent, and appearing at a store opening can count as performing in a "distinguished production." The total number of O-1 visas granted annually increased by more than 50% between 2014 and 2024, even as overall non-immigrant visa issuance grew by just 10%. Fewer than 20,000 O-1 visas were granted in 2024. Some attorneys said they worry the fixation on algorithm-driven metrics could disadvantage traditionally trained artists whose work doesn't generate viral attention.

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Remember when HP made its own CPUs and Unix? We wonder if it does

The final version of HPE's own flavor of Unix, HP-UX 11i v3, is now out of support. It is the end of a line that started in 1982.…

Samsung is bringing a pair of retro-styled speaker concepts to CES 2026 that combine old-school aesthetics with OLED screens and AI-powered music recommendations, and the company is positioning them as alternatives to conventional Bluetooth speakers that typically depend on a paired smartphone or tablet for content selection. The "AI OLED Cassette" features a 1.5-inch round OLED display, while the larger "AI OLED Turntable" uses a 13.4-inch round panel, and both allow users to receive music suggestions, browse and select content directly on the device, and set ambient moods using images and video playback.

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A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hong Kong has found that Chinese graduate students who plagiarized more heavily in their master's theses were significantly more likely to pursue careers in the civil service and to climb the ranks faster once inside. John Liu and co-authors analyzed 6 million dissertations from CNKI, a Chinese academic repository, and cross-referenced them against public records of civil-service exam-takers to identify 120,000 civil servants and their academic work. Those who entered the public sector had plagiarism scores 15.6% above average. Customs and tax officials fared worst -- their scores ran 25% and 26% higher than private-sector peers respectively. Within the civil service, those who plagiarized more were promoted 9% faster during the first five years of their careers. The researchers validated their plagiarism metric through an experiment involving 443 job applicants who were asked to roll dice for rewards without monitoring. Those who had plagiarized more also reported improbably high rolls.

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Stack Overflow's monthly question volume has collapsed to about 300 -- levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform's activity over its sixteen-year history. Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that accelerated dramatically after ChatGPT's November 2022 launch. By May 2025, monthly questions had fallen to early-2009 levels, and the latest data through early 2026 shows the collapse has only continued -- the line now sits near the bottom of the chart, barely registering. The decline predates LLMs. Questions began dropping around 2014 when Stack Overflow improved moderator efficiency and closed questions more aggressively. In mid-2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. The founders, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, exited before the terminal decline became apparent. ChatGPT accelerated what was already underway. The chatbot answers programming questions faster, draws on Stack Overflow's own corpus for training data, and doesn't close questions for being duplicates.

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It's January 2026, and Google is finding innovative new ways to make one of its services worse

Important news for Gmail power users: Google is dropping the feature whereby Gmail can collect mail from other email accounts over POP3.…

Samsung's co-CEO TM Roh has warned that product price increases are "inevitable" as an unprecedented global memory chip shortage squeezes margins across the company's consumer electronics lineup -- from smartphones to televisions and home appliances. The South Korean giant, one of the top two largest smartphone manufacturers, plans to double the number of mobile devices running its Galaxy AI features to 800 million units this year, up from 400 million at the end of 2025. Galaxy AI is powered by Google's Gemini model and Samsung's own Bixby assistant for different tasks. "As this situation is unprecedented, no company is immune to its impact," Roh told Reuters in his first interview since becoming co-CEO in November. Samsung is working with partners on longer-term strategies to minimize the impact, he said. Market researchers IDC and Counterpoint predict the global smartphone market will shrink this year as the chip shortage threatens to drive up phone prices. The shortage is a boon to Samsung's semiconductor business but pressures margins on its smartphone division, the company's second-largest revenue source.

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Direct-to-device services from low Earth orbit floated to plug coverage gaps

Satellite phone services could play a part in Britain's troubled Emergency Services Network (ESN) project, including SpaceX's Starlink platform, to plug gaps in the coverage provided by terrestrial network tech.…

Outsourcer promises customers a service with 'AI at its core.' They just want a website that works

Capita has told users of its ailing UK civil service pension portal to wait until new chatbots go live before contacting it again about problems.…

America's tech companies and data center developers "are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don't want to live next to them, or even near them," reports the Associated Press: Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other's battles against data center proposals that are fast multiplying in number and size to meet steep demand as developers branch out in search of faster connections to power sources... [A]s more people hear about a data center coming to their community, once-sleepy municipal board meetings in farming towns and growing suburbs now feature crowded rooms of angry residents pressuring local officials to reject the requests... A growing number of proposals are going down in defeat, sounding alarms across the data center constellation of Big Tech firms, real estate developers, electric utilities, labor unions and more. Andy Cvengros, who helps lead the data center practice at commercial real estate giant JLL, counted seven or eight deals he'd worked on in recent months that saw opponents going door-to-door, handing out shirts or putting signs in people's yards. "It's becoming a huge problem," Cvengros said. Data Center Watch, a project of 10a Labs, an AI security consultancy, said it is seeing a sharp escalation in community, political and regulatory disruptions to data center development. Between April and June alone, its latest reporting period, it counted 20 proposals valued at $98 billion in 11 states that were blocked or delayed amid local opposition and state-level pushback. That amounts to two-thirds of the projects it was tracking... For some people angry over steep increases in electric bills, their patience is thin for data centers that could bring still-higher increases. Losing open space, farmland, forest or rural character is a big concern. So is the damage to quality of life, property values or health by on-site diesel generators kicking on or the constant hum of servers. Others worry that wells and aquifers could run dry...

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Government 'incredibly' concerned about breach potentially affecting more than 100,000 patients

New Zealand health minister Simeon Brown has ordered a review into the cyberattack at ManageMyHealth, which threatens the data of hundreds of thousands of Kiwis.…

From buried settings to geopolitical risk, the business model is surveillance

Opinion At the end of last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five of the largest TV companies, accusing them of excessive and deceptive surveillance of their customers.…

2025'S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books: Anyone who has read Tolkien's letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien's fury — specifically, ire over mankind's obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien's anger is expressed through a playful satire told from the perspective of a group of future archaeologists who are studying the titular fragments, which tell of a civilization that asphyxiated itself on its own exhaust fumes. Tolkien's fictional fragments use the language of ancient myth, reframing modern issues like traffic congestion and parking with a grandeur that highlights their total absurdity. It is Tolkien at his angriest and funniest, making The Bovadium Fragments a minor treasure in his ever-growing catalog... As Tolkien put it in one of his private letters, "the spirit of 'Isengard,' if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case." Readers of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) will recognize the allusion. In the author's magnum opus, Isengard is a kind of industrial hell, endlessly feeding its furnaces with felled trees... The Bovadium Fragments brings Tolkien's visceral hatred of such machines to the fore for the first time — on the same level as Isengard or the scoured Shire. In Tolkien's story, the words "Motores" and "monsters" are interchangeable. And with his grand, mythic register, Tolkien defamiliarizes the car enough for modern readers to see it as he does — as truly monstrous. "[T]he Motores continued to bring forth an ever larger progeny," Tolkien writes. "[M]any of the citizens harboured the monsters, feeding them with the costly oils and essences which they required, and building houses for them in their gardens...." One suspects that Tolkien would have preferred to see Oxford return to the era of the donkey cart. That kind of nostalgia is familiar in Tolkien's work — the idea that we developed just a little too far, skipping past an Eden we failed to recognize a generation or two ago. (For Tolkien, the paragon of paradise seems to have been a rural village around the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.) But he also knows that mankind's impulse to develop is something we cannot help. And the inevitable blowback we get from our hubris is something we cannot avoid. That defeatist attitude is suggested in the frame narrative to The Bovadium Fragments, in which the archaeologists smugly declare their superiority to the extinct citizens of old Oxford. "We at any rate are not likely to fall into such folly," one of them says. In their more enlightened future, we are told, they only pursue the more benign science of longevity. Their wish is that one day they shall "at last conquer mortality, and not 'die like animals.'" But humans are animals, Tolkien argues. And in stretching beyond that, we may find progress and modern conveniences like motorcars. But perhaps we also pave a road to Isengard. And we may not recognize that destination until it is too late — until we are trapped within its walls, suffocating on our own exhaust fumes.

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Meet the ‘Mean Avenger’, the office anti-hero who steps in when managers don’t defend their team

Who, Me? How on earth is it 2026 already? The Register will ponder that existential matter after first presenting a new instalment of “Who, Me?” – the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of things you shouldn’t do at work, and how you escape them unscathed.…

Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews. They call it "the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux." I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never "leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract)... Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it. As the clocks chimed midnight on New Year's Eve, he advised everyone to "spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists."

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While California's residents have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company," reports TechCrunch. But now Californians can make "a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information" — using the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (or DROP): Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state... Brokers are supposed to start processing requests in August 2026, then they have 90 days to actually process requests and report back. If they don't delete your data, you'll have the option to submit additional information that may help them locate your records. Companies will also be able to keep first-party data that they've collected from users. It's only brokers who seek to buy or sell that data — which can include your social security number, browsing history, email address, phone number, and more — who will be required to delete it... The California Privacy Protection Agency says that in addition to giving residents more control over their data, the tool could result in fewer "unwanted texts, calls, or emails" and also decrease the "risk of identity theft, fraud, AI impersonations, or that your data is leaked or hacked."

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North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law's language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, "that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill." The inclusion of fictional substances is being called an embarrassment by one state official, a possible practical joke by coal industry leaders and mystifying by the lawmakers who worked on the bill, the North Dakota Monitor reported. The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. Straley said they were not responsible for adding the fake names. "I assume it was put in to embarrass us, or to make light of it, or have a practical joke," Straley said, adding it could have been a clerical error. Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring questioned the two substances listed in state law during a recent meeting of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which is poised to adopt rules based on the legislation... Friezium and stralium first appeared in the bill on the last afternoon of the legislative session as lawmakers hurried to pass several final bills... The amended bill is labeled as prepared by Legislative Council for Rep. Dick Anderson, R-Willow City, the prime sponsor and chair of the conference committee. Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry... Jonathan Fortner, president of the Lignite Energy Council that represents the coal industry, said it's unfortunate this happened in such an important bill. "From the president on down, everyone's interested in developing domestic critical minerals for national security reasons," Fortner said. "While this may have been a legislative joke between some people that somehow got through, the bigger picture is one that is important and is a very serious matter."

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