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A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea automatically captures screenshots every five minutes and stores them in a hidden folder inaccessible to users, according to analysis by the BBC. Authorities can later review these images to monitor citizen activity on the device. The phone, obtained by Seoul-based media outlet Daily NK, resembles a Huawei or Honor device but runs state-approved software designed for surveillance and control. The device also automatically censors text, replacing "South Korea" with "puppet state" and Korean terms of endearment with "comrade."

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Remember Salt Typhoon? Anyone?

A group of Democratic senators has urged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reestablish the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), which had been investigating how China's Salt Typhoon hacked US government and telecommunications networks.…

Snowflake's growth among large enterprise customers faces a significant bottleneck tied to the sluggish replacement cycles of existing on-premises data warehouse systems, according to finance vice president Jimmy Sexton. Speaking at a Jefferies conference, Sexton explained that while the cloud data company secured two deals worth more than $100 million each in the financial services sector during its latest quarter, such migrations unfold over multiple years as "cumbersome projects."

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NAACP claims that 'temporary' gas turbines were an attempt to get around environmental laws

Elon Musk's smog-belching Colossus AI datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee, is once again catching heat, this time from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which urges local authorities to halt operations and fine the startup for what it sees as a "clear" violation of the Clean Air Act.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet service provider Frontier Communications agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by major record labels that demanded mass disconnections of broadband users accused of piracy. Universal, Sony, and Warner sued Frontier in 2021. In a notice of settlement filed last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the parties agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice, with each side to pay its own fees and costs. The record labels and Frontier simultaneously announced a settlement of similar claims in a Bankruptcy Court case in the same district. Frontier also settled with movie companies in April of this year, just before a trial was scheduled to begin. (Frontier exited bankruptcy in 2021.) [...] Regardless of what is in the agreement, the question of whether ISPs should have to crack down more harshly on users accused of piracy could be decided by the US Supreme Court.

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Automated web-scraping bots seeking training data for AI models are flooding scientific databases and academic journals with traffic volumes that render many sites unusable. The online image repository DiscoverLife, which contains nearly 3 million species photographs, started receiving millions of daily hits in February this year that slowed the site to the point that it no longer loaded, Nature reported Monday. The surge has intensified since the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese large language model that demonstrated effective AI could be built with fewer computational resources than previously thought. This revelation triggered what industry observers describe as an "explosion of bots seeking to scrape the data needed to train this type of model." The Confederation of Open Access Repositories reported that more than 90% of 66 surveyed members experienced AI bot scraping, with roughly two-thirds suffering service disruptions. Medical journal publisher BMJ has seen bot traffic surpass legitimate user activity, overloading servers and interrupting customer services.

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$100 million+ deals are beholden to enterprises' on-prem upgrade cycles

Snowflake's ability to grow in the market for larger enterprise customers is hampered by the renewal cycle for older, on-prem data warehouse and analytics tech.…

Microsoft will require all USB-C ports on Windows 11 certified laptops and tablets to support data transfer, charging, and display functionality under updated hardware compatibility program rules. The mandate targets devices shipping with Windows 11 24H2 and aims to eliminate what Microsoft -- and the industry -- calls "USB-C port confusion," where identical-looking ports offer different capabilities across PC manufacturers. The Windows Hardware Compatibility Program updates also require USB 40Gbps ports to maintain full compatibility with both USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 peripherals.

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Apple has filed an appeal with the European Union's General Court in Luxembourg challenging the bloc's order requiring greater iOS interoperability with rival companies' products under the Digital Markets Act. The EU executive in March directed Apple to make its mobile operating system more compatible with competitors' apps, headphones, and virtual reality headsets by granting developers and device makers access to system components typically reserved for Apple's own products. Apple contends the requirements threaten its seamless user experience while creating security risks, noting that companies have already requested access to sensitive user data including notification content and complete WiFi network histories. The company faces potential fines of up to 10% of its worldwide annual revenue if found in violation of the DMA's interoperability rules designed to curb Big Tech market power.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Business Insider announced this week that it wants staff to better incorporate AI into its journalism. But less than a year ago, the company had to quietly apologize to some staff for accidentally recommending that they read books that did not appear to exist but instead may have been generated by AI. In an email to staff last May, a senior editor at Business Insider sent around a list of what she called "Beacon Books," a list of memoirs and other acclaimed business nonfiction books, with the idea of ensuring staff understood some of the fundamental figures and writing powering good business journalism. Many of the recommendations were well-known recent business, media, and tech nonfiction titles such as Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, DisneyWar by James Stewart, and Super Pumped by Mike Isaac. But a few were unfamiliar to staff. Simply Target: A CEO's Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand by former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was nowhere to be found. Neither was Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia, which was supposedly published by the company Charles River Editors in 2019.

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Is that 'best' for customers or for shareholders? Any vendors that think they've got this 'all figured out is kidding themselves'

A senior Salesforce exec says users need to be flexible about AI pricing models while vendors determine which one works best.…

A new analysis argues that Stack Overflow's decline began years before AI tools delivered the "final blow" to the once-dominant programming forum. The site's monthly questions dropped from a peak of 200,000 to a steep collapse that began in earnest after ChatGPT's 2023 launch, but usage had been declining since 2014, according to data cited in the InfoWorld analysis. The platform's remarkable reputation system initially elevated it above competitors by allowing users to earn points and badges for helpful contributions, but that same system eventually became its downfall, the piece argues. As Stack Overflow evolved into a self-governing platform where high-reputation users gained moderation powers, the community transformed from a welcoming space for developer interaction into what the author compares to a "Stanford Prison Experiment" where moderators systematically culled interactions they deemed irrelevant.

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White House withdraws Isaacman pick amid potential $6B funding drop

More details are emerging about potential NASA budget cuts alongside the abrupt withdrawal of the nomination of Jared Isaacman as the agency's new administrator.…

A new business model has emerged across China's major cities, El Pais reports, where companies charge unemployed individuals to rent desk space and pretend to work, responding to social pressure around joblessness amid rising youth unemployment rates. These services charge between 30 and 50 yuan ($4-7) daily for desks, Wi-Fi, coffee, and lunch in spaces designed to mimic traditional work environments. Some operations assign fictitious tasks and organize supervisory rounds to enhance the illusion, while premium services allow clients to roleplay as managers or stage workplace conflicts for additional fees. The trend has gained significant traction on Xiaohongshu, China's equivalent to Instagram, where advertisements for "pretend-to-work companies" accumulate millions of views. Youth unemployment reached 16.5% among 16-to-24-year-olds in March 2025, according to National Bureau of Statistics data, while overall urban unemployment stood at 5.3% in the first quarter.

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It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them

Microsoft is updating Notepad again. The latest indignity for the veteran Windows text wrangler? Text formatting.…

29M customers, four radio suppliers, and one hell of a network headache

Network engineers can take solace from the completed merger of Three and Vodafone announced today, as the difficult technical work now starts to unify their separate networks over the next several years.…

Disclosure at MainStreet Bancshares comes as American finance orgs beg for looser reporting requirements

Community bank MainStreet Bancshares says thieves stole data belonging to some of its customers during an attack on a third-party provider.…

"If the adoption of AI feels different from any tech revolution you may have experienced before — mobile, social, cloud computing — it actually is," writes TechCrunch. They cite a new 340-page report from venture capitalist Mary Meeker that details how AI adoption has outpaced any other tech in human history — and uses the word "unprecedented" on 51 pages: ChatGPT reaching 800 million users in 17 months: unprecedented. The number of companies and the rate at which so many others are hitting high annual recurring revenue rates: also unprecedented. The speed at which costs of usage are dropping: unprecedented. While the costs of training a model (also unprecedented) is up to $1 billion, inference costs — for example, those paying to use the tech — has already dropped 99% over two years, when calculating cost per 1 million tokens, she writes, citing research from Stanford. The pace at which competitors are matching each other's features, at a fraction of the cost, including open source options, particularly Chinese models: unprecedented... Meanwhile, chips from Google, like its TPU (tensor processing unit), and Amazon's Trainium, are being developed at scale for their clouds — that's moving quickly, too. "These aren't side projects — they're foundational bets," she writes. "The one area where AI hasn't outpaced every other tech revolution is in financial returns..." the article points out. "[T]he jury is still out over which of the current crop of companies will become long-term, profitable, next-generation tech giants."

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Vision AI won't be part of sale but strategic supercomputers will

Stumbling Euro tech giant Atos looks set to finally sell its Advanced Computing assets to the French state.…

Fancy getting rolling with something Qt and Italian?

OpenMamba is an independent Italian distribution which uses Fedora's packaging tools and offers a choice of KDE Plasma or LXQt.…