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Weak demand for iPhone Air and delays to a costly foldable tablet suggest Cupertino's hardware experiments are struggling

Apple's run of hardware experiments appears to be hitting some turbulence: The company's ultra-thin iPhone Air has reportedly failed to catch on with buyers, while its long-awaited foldable iPad is slipping further down the calendar amid engineering snags and soaring costs.…

Intense discussion approves AI – but subject to full responsibility and disclosure

The Fedora Council has approved AI-assisted contributions to its Linux distribution, following intense debate and subject to strict conditions.…

Check Point helps exorcise vast 'Ghost Network' that used fake tutorials to push infostealers

Google has taken down thousands of YouTube videos that were quietly spreading password-stealing malware disguised as cracked software and game cheats.…

Microsoft has set a 30% profit margin goal for its Xbox gaming division, Bloomberg reported Thursday, well above the video game industry's average of 17% to 22%. The target, implemented in fall 2023 by CFO Amy Hood, represents a sharp departure from Xbox's previous approach of allowing developers to focus on making quality games without specific financial constraints. Xbox historically maintained profit margins between 10% and 20% and reported a 12% margin for the first nine months of Microsoft's 2022 fiscal year. The division has responded by canceling several projects that had been in development for more than seven years, including Everwild, Perfect Dark and Project Blackbird. It has also eliminated thousands of jobs and raised prices. In 2024, Xbox began releasing most of its games on rival Nintendo and Sony platforms. The heightened scrutiny comes as Microsoft prioritizes investment in generative AI while overseeing a gaming division that has struggled despite spending $76.5 billion on acquisitions.

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Fault in DynamoDB system cascaded through AWS services, knocking major sites offline for hours

Amazon has published a detailed postmortem explaining how a critical fault in DynamoDB's DNS management system cascaded into a day-long outage that disrupted major websites and services across multiple brands – with damage estimates potentially reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.…

Share price dips as cloud sales outlook disappoints amid slow US public sector bookings

SAP disappointed investors today after reporting full-year cloud revenue at the bottom end of its guidance range, with execs saying customers in manufacturing and the public sector are taking longer to sign contracts.…

Cornyn & co ask DoJ to probe respected research institution for trying to 'influence' public

The saga of the Great Space Shuttle Relocation has taken another turn after US lawmakers asked the Department of Justice to look into alleged lobbying by the Smithsonian museum to prevent a possible transfer of Discovery to Houston, Texas.…

Why monitor staff through phones or cameras when Bezos' boxshifter can strap surveillance to their heads?

Amazon is testing AI-powered smart glasses to help its drivers get from their vans to customers' doorsteps.…

Survey probes interest in AI assistance for locally hosted email setups

Microsoft's mission to "Copilot all the things" has reached Exchange Server, with a survey asking if admins want the AI assistant on-prem.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Apple has been working on a new framework called AppMigrationKit, which will be compatible with devices running iOS 26.1 and later, as well as iPadOS 26.1 and later. Like iOS and iPadOS 26.1, the framework is currently in beta and will allow developers to include their app's data during the migration process between Apple and non-Apple devices (which, for now, essentially means Android). Interestingly, Apple notes that this framework is not intended for data migration between iOS and iPadOS, but rather exclusively to and from non-Apple devices: "AppMigrationKit only supports migration to and from non-Apple platforms, such as Android. The system doesn't use the framework for migration between iOS or iPadOS devices. The framework also has no functionality in iOS apps running in visionOS or in macOS on Apple silicon. The framework ignores calls from Mac apps built with Mac Catalyst." The AppMigrationKit documentation can be found here.

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Criminal outfits had been using Musk's broadband beacons to run cyber-slavery scams across Southeast Asia

SpaceX says it has shut down thousands of Starlink terminals that were powering Myanmar's notorious scam compounds after its satellite network was found to be keeping human trafficking and cyber-fraud operations online in the country's lawless border zones.…

The wheels on Copilot's hockey stick must be giving off smoke by now

Microsoft's finance division has a term for an overly optimistic projection that seems to march backward year after year: the hockey stick on wheels.…

New version includes multithreaded TCP/IP and Raspberry Pi 5 support

The 59th version of the OpenBSD operating system is here, six months after 7.7, with multiple improvements in various areas.…

Meanwhile, civil services claims 75,000 days could be saved by the tech each year

Ignoring the skeptics and threat of an AI bubble, the UK government is pushing ahead with AI "sandboxing" and backing a raft of projects it claims could benefit from red-tape cutting.…

SpaceX has deactivated over 2,500 Starlink terminals allegedly used by scam operations in Myanmar, where the service isn't licensed but was reportedly enabling large-scale cybercrime networks tied to human trafficking and fraud. Ars Technica reports: Lauren Dreyer, vice president of Starlink business operations, described the action in an X post last night after reports that Myanmar's military shut down a major scam operation: "SpaceX complies with local laws in all 150+ markets where Starlink is licensed to operate," Dreyer wrote. "SpaceX continually works to identify violations of our Acceptable Use Policy and applicable law... On the rare occasion we identify a violation, we take appropriate action, including working with law enforcement agencies around the world. In Myanmar, for example, SpaceX proactively identified and disabled over 2,500 Starlink Kits in the vicinity of suspected 'scam centers.'" Starlink is not licensed to operate in Myanmar. While Dreyer didn't say how the terminals were disabled, it's known that Starlink can disable individual terminals based on their ID numbers or use geofencing to block areas from receiving signals. On Monday, Myanmar state media reported that "Myanmar's military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite Internet terminals," according to an Associated Press article. The army reportedly raided a cybercrime center known as KK Park as part of operations that began in early September. The operations reportedly targeted 260 unregistered buildings and resulted in seizure of 30 Starlink terminals and detention of 2,198 people. "Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park," the AP wrote. The Karen National Union is "part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar's civil war" and "deny any involvement in the scams."

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Cupertino wants you on certain channels, and pushes back if you have your own preferences

Networking researcher Christoff Visser has found that Apple devices cause Wi-Fi networks to “jitter” due to traffic generated by the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) tech that powers the peer-to-peer AirDrop filesharing tool.…

We could really have used this a couple of days ago, guys

In the same week that a massive outage of its own cloud inconvenienced millions of customers, AWS has delivered an improved interactive incident reporting service to help its customers explain what happened when their cloud-hosted resources strike trouble.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: This week, a reader wrote to us sharing that the infotainment in their 2020 Audi A4 had been "rebooting every five minutes all year." It looks like the problem was caused by a compatibility issue with a SiriusXM app update. Audi tells us the situation's been rectified, but it illustrates a serious pain point in modern cars -- myriad apps interacting with a diverse population of in-car software systems. Our reader was not the only Audi owner affected. "Randomly restarting" Audi infotainment screens have been discussed on Reddit, the Audiworld forum, and elsewhere, going back many months. Audi's recall notice and related service action only went out this summer. It looks like this particular problem was caused when the satellite radio app pushed an update that was supposed to work on the latest version of Audi's infotainment software, but not all cars were running that. Then SiriusXM reverted, which, I guess, did not solve the problem for every owner. Audi now states that the problem has been fixed and originated with the SiriusXM app, but really, the automaker bears more than a little blame, too. [...] I dropped our own contacts at Audi a note about how and why this might have happened, and they added this clarification: "At the beginning of the year, SiriusXM did a programming update which was addressed via a software update to the MMI. However, as not all customers had their cars updated and SiriusXM then reverted back to the previous category numbering. Nonetheless, a MMI update is recommended as the two versions do seem to cause the issue."

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Meta is laying off about 600 employees from its AI division as part of a restructuring to streamline operations and solidify Alexandr Wang's leadership over the company's AI strategy. "Workers across Meta's AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted," notes CNBC. "However, the cuts did not impact employees within TBD Labs, which includes many of the top-tier AI hires brought into the social media company this summer." From the report: Those employees, overseen by Wang, were spared by the layoffs, underscoring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's bet on his expensive hires versus the legacy employees, the people said. Within Meta, the AI unit was considered to be bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often vying for computing resources, the people said. When the company's new hires joined the company to create Superintelligence Labs, it inherited the oversized Meta AI unit, they said. The layoffs are an attempt by Meta to continue trim the department and further cement Wang's role in steering the company's AI strategy. Following the cuts, Meta's Superintelligence Labs' workforce now sits at just under 3,000, the people said.

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Infra revenue soars and AI helps everything … except the share price

If IBM reveals improved profit margins or a fresh round of redundancies, AI may be the reason, because Big Blue today revealed that its own “Project Bob” developer assistance tools have improved productivity among its coders by 45 percent.…