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Czech researcher lays out a business case for reducing reliance on Redmond

Comment A sharply argued blog post warns that heavy reliance on Microsoft poses serious strategic risks for organizations – a viewpoint unlikely to win favor with Redmond or its millions of corporate customers.…

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that's about to change. From a report: Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen. The simplified BSOD looks a lot more like the black screen you'd see during a Windows update. But it will list the stop code and faulty system driver that you wouldn't always see during a crash dump. IT admins shouldn't need to pull crash dumps off PCs and analyze them with tools like WinDbg just to find out what could be causing issues. The company will roll out this new BSOD design in an update to Windows 11 "later this summer."

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837 megawatt reactor now expected in 2027, energy CEO says

A revamped Three Mile Island nuclear plant could be fueling Microsoft's AI datacenters sooner than first thought, according to Constellation Energy executives.…

A 10.0 and a 9.8 – these aren’t patches to dwell on

Cisco has dropped patches for a pair of critical vulnerabilities that could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to execute code on vulnerable systems.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Malaysia will ban plastic waste imports from the U.S. starting Tuesday because of America's failure to abide by the Basel Convention treaty on international waste transfers, in a move that could have significant consequences for California. Malaysia emerged as a major destination for U.S. waste after China banned American waste imports in 2018. California shipped 864 shipping containers, or more than 10 million pounds of plastic waste, to Malaysia in 2024, according to the Basel Action Network, an advocacy group. That was second only to Georgia among U.S. states. Under Malaysian waste guidelines announced last month, the country will no longer accept plastic waste and hazardous waste from nations that didn't ratify the Basel Convention, the international treaty designed to reduce the international movement of hazardous and other waste. The U.S. is one of just a handful of countries, including Fiji and Haiti, that hasn't signed the pact.

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Microsoft is preparing to release a private preview of Windows changes that will move antivirus and endpoint detection and response apps out of the Windows kernel, nearly a year after a faulty CrowdStrike update crashed 8.5 million Windows-based machines worldwide. The new Windows endpoint security platform is being developed in cooperation with CrowdStrike, Bitdefender, ESET, Trend Micro, and other security vendors. David Weston, Microsoft's vice president of enterprise and OS security, said dozens of partners have submitted papers detailing design requirements, some hundreds of pages long. The private preview will allow security vendors to request changes before the platform is finalized.

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22 years on from the last spec, you can now animate your PNGs

The free graphics format that people actually know how to pronounce has been updated.…

Accenture is facing mounting challenges as AI threatens to disrupt the consulting industry the company helped build. The Dublin-based firm, which made its fortune advising clients on adapting to new technologies from the internet to cloud computing, now confronts the same predicament as generative AI reshapes business operations. The company's new generative AI contracts slowed to $100 million in the most recent quarter, down from $200 million per quarter last year. Technology partners including Microsoft and SAP are increasingly integrating AI directly into their offerings, allowing systems to work immediately without extensive consulting support. Newcomers like Palantir are embedding their own engineers with customers, enabling clients to bypass traditional consultants. Between 2015 and 2024, Accenture generated a 370% total return by helping companies navigate technological transitions. The firm reached a $250 billion valuation in February before losing $60 billion in market value. CEO Julie Sweet insists that the company is reorganizing around "reinvention services." A recent survey found 42% of companies abandoned most AI initiatives, up from 17% a year ago.

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Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School found that people who used large language models to research topics demonstrated weaker understanding and produced less original insights compared to those using Google searches. The study, involving more than 4,500 participants across four experiments, showed LLM users spent less time researching, exerted less effort, and wrote shorter, less detailed responses. In the first experiment, over 1,100 participants researched vegetable gardening using either Google or ChatGPT. Google users wrote longer responses with more unique phrasing and factual references. A second experiment with nearly 2,000 participants presented identical gardening information either as an AI summary or across mock webpages, with Google users again engaging more deeply and retaining more information.

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The idea of handing off networking chores to DPUs persists even if it hasn't caught on beyond hyperscalers

Analysis In 2013, Amazon Web Services announced a new C3 instance type and made vague references to what it described as "enhanced networking" enabled by an Intel Virtual Function interface.…

CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated the online recruitment industry, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week and said it plans to sell its businesses. From a report: Created through the September merger of CareerBuilder and Monster, the Chicago-based company said it agreed to sell its job board operations, its most recognizable business, to JobGet, which has an app for so-called gig workers.

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You are not prepared for 5 GW datacenters, Deloitte warns

Power required by AI datacenters in the US may be more than 30 times greater in a decade, with 5 GW facilities already in the pipeline..…

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff said Thursday his company has automated a significant chunk of work with AI, another example of a firm touting labor-replacing potential of the emerging technology. From a report: "AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now," Benioff said in an interview, pointing at job functions including software engineering and customer service. [...] Salesforce has said that use of AI internally has allowed it to hire fewer people. The San Francisco-based software company is focused on selling an AI product that promises to handle tasks such as customer service without human supervision. Benioff said that tool has reached about 93% accuracy, including for large customers such as Walt Disney.

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Cosmic research on hold while engineers investigate a problematic motor

NASA's NICER X-ray telescope is pausing operations just weeks after the US space agency boasted that a January repair and reconfiguration had improved its daytime measurements.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The head of the federal government agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wants the mortgage giants to consider accepting a homebuyer's cryptocurrency holdings in their criteria for buying mortgages from banks. William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, ordered the agencies Wednesday to prepare a proposal for consideration of crypto as an asset for reserves when they assess risks in single-family home loans. Pulte also instructed the agencies that their mortgage risk assessments should not require cryptocurrency assets to be converted to U.S. dollars. And only crypto assets that "can be evidenced and stored on a U.S.-regulated centralized exchange subject to all applicable laws" are to be considered by the agencies in their proposal, Pulte wrote in a written order, effective immediately. Pulte was sworn in as the head of FHFA in March. Public records show that as of January 2025, Pulte's spouse owned between $500,000 and $1 million of bitcoin and a similar amount of Solana's SOL token. [...] The policy change is meant to encourage banks to expand how they gauge borrowers' creditworthiness, in hopes that more aspiring homebuyers can qualify for a home loan. It also recognizes that cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity as an alternative to traditional investments, such as bonds and stocks. The agencies have to come up with their proposals "as soon as reasonably practical," according to the order. "This is a big win for advocates of cryptocurrencies who want crypto to be treated the same way as other assets are," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. Currently, stock investments are treated as qualifying assets that count toward reserves that banks want borrowers to have. But assets that are more volatile, like individual stocks or crypto, may be discounted by lenders, Fairweather noted. "As long as lenders are appropriately discounting crypto based on volatility, it's fine that crypto investments count toward reserves," she said. Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, added: "If Fannie and Freddie are going to accept cryptocurrency as collateral, that's a strong incentive for banks to shift their practices. Because people who might otherwise have to sell cryptocurrency to qualify -- and maybe that's a deal-breaker for them now -- under this new policy, they can qualify. It sort of expands the potential pool of eligible buyers."

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Business data is fragmented and change management is hard

Interview Adoption of generative AI for enterprise customers isn't taking off in the manner many in the industry expected – and there are major obstacles in the way, according to Rania Succar, recently appointed CEO at Kaseya.…

Nothing confirmed but authority is operating under the assumption that data has been stolen

A cyberattack on Glasgow City Council is causing massive disruption with a slew of its digital services unavailable.…

Pathology outage caused by Synnovis breach linked to harm across dozens of healthcare facilities

The NHS says Qilin's ransomware attack on pathology services provider Synnovis last year led to the death of a patient.…

Apple's advanced next-generation Lisp is still being maintained as FOSS

OpenDylan is a Lisp without all the parentheses – just as John McCarthy originally intended for LISP-2.…

Italian utility A2A and French tech firm Qarnot have launched a data center in Brescia, Italy, that captures waste heat from servers and redirects it to a local district heating system. "The Brescia project is expected to meet the heating needs of more than 1,350 apartments and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 3,500 tons annually -- equivalent to the absorption capacity of over 22,000 trees," reports Reuters. From the report: "The rapid spread of data centers and the growing electrification of consumption require major investments in power grids. But data centers also offer a remarkable opportunity for cities with district heating networks," A2A CEO Renato Mazzoncini said at the inauguration. "In (the Italian region of) Lombardy alone, with projects already in the pipeline, we estimate that 150,000 apartments could be heated this way," Mazzoncini added.

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