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SenseShield the latest company to fall foul of 24H2

Microsoft has thrown up a Windows 11 24H2 compatibility hold for devices running SenseShield Technology's sprotect.sys driver.…

Updated programs suggest ARIA will keep singing for another year

The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has appointed a second tranche of program leaders and announced new program areas, suggesting confidence in its long-term funding.…

Established software companies hoping to ride the AI wave are facing a stiff headwind: many of their potential customers are building AI tools themselves. This do-it-yourself approach is channeling billions in spending towards cloud computing providers but leaving traditional software vendors struggling to capitalize, complicating their AI growth plans. Cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are pulling in an estimated $22 billion from AI services, with Azure alone capturing $11.3 billion. Yet, software application vendors have collectively garnered only about $2 billion from selling AI products. Stripping out Microsoft's popular Copilot tools, that figure drops to a mere $450 million across all other vendors combined. Why are companies choosing the harder path of building? Feedback gathered by UBS points to several key factors driving this "persistent DIY trend." Many business uses for AI are highly specific or narrow, making generic software unsuitable. Off-the-shelf AI products are often considered too expensive, and crucially, the essential ingredients -- powerful AI models, cloud computing access, and the company's own data -- are increasingly available directly, lessening the need for traditional software packages.

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Strangely no eighth tip to use something else

Microsoft has published seven tips for getting the most out of Windows 11, and the pitches for the operating system – which has failed to win hearts and minds of users – are not very compelling.…

Public-private partnership zaps photons at hotspots, hopes to ship by 2027

A startup backed by Sandia National Laboratories thinks it's found a cool new way to keep the world's supercomputers and datacenters cool enough to run efficiently: Zap ‘em with lasers.…

Recently formed AI Preferences Working Group has August deadline to develop ideas on how to tell crawlers to go away, or come for a feast

The Internet Engineering Task Force has chartered a group it hopes will create a standard that lets content creators tell AI developers whether it’s OK to use their work.…

The world used clean power sources to meet more than 40% of its electricity demand last year for the first time since the 1940s, figures show. The Guardian: A report by the energy thinktank Ember said the milestone was powered by a boom in solar power capacity, which has doubled in the last three years. The report found that solar farms had been the world's fastest-growing source of energy for the last 20 consecutive years. Phil MacDonald, Ember's managing director, said: "Solar power has become the engine of the global energy transition. Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force. As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world's ever-increasing demand for electricity." Overall, solar power remains a relatively small part of the global energy system. It made up almost 7% of the world's electricity last year, according to Ember, while wind power made up just over 8% of the global power system. The fast-growing technologies remain dwarfed by hydro power, which has remained relatively steady in recent years, and made up 14% of the worldâ(TM)s electricity in 2024.

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Fake job seekers using AI tools to impersonate candidates are increasingly targeting U.S. companies with remote positions, creating a growing security threat across industries. By 2028, one in four global job applicants will be fake, according to Gartner. These imposters use AI to fabricate photo IDs, generate employment histories, and provide interview answers, often targeting cybersecurity and cryptocurrency firms, CNBC reports. Once hired, fraudulent employees can install malware to demand ransoms, steal customer data, or simply collect salaries they wouldn't otherwise obtain, according to Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop Security. The problem extends beyond tech companies. Last year, the Justice Department alleged more than 300 U.S. firms inadvertently hired impostors with ties to North Korea, including major corporations across various sectors.

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Feds claim creaky COBOL, user spike is real reason key portal now flaky

The United States Social Security Administration's internet portal has frequently gone offline in recent weeks, and presented inaccurate or incomplete information to users, perhaps because of changes steered by Elon Musk's cost-trimming DOGE unit.…

Lawsuit claims sick cyber-voyeurism went undetected for years, using hundreds of PCs, due to lax infosec

A now-former pharmacist at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) has been accused of compromising the US healthcare organization's IT systems to ogle female clinicians using webcams at their workplace and at their homes.…

Hackers intercepted about 103 bank regulators' emails for more than a year, gaining access to highly sensitive financial information, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter and a draft letter to Congress. From the report: The attackers were able to monitor employee emails at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency after breaking into an administrator's account, said the people, asking not to be identified because the information isn't public. OCC on Feb. 12 confirmed that there had been unauthorized activity on its systems after a Microsoft security team the day before had notified OCC about unusual network behavior, according to the draft letter. The OCC is an independent bureau of the Treasury Department that regulates and supervises all national banks, federal savings associations and the federal branches and agencies of foreign banks -- together holding trillions of dollars in assets. OCC on Tuesday notified Congress about the compromise, describing it as a "major information security incident." "The analysis concluded that the highly sensitive bank information contained in the emails and attachments is likely to result in demonstrable harm to public confidence," OCC Chief Information Officer Kristen Baldwin wrote in the draft letter to Congress that was seen by Bloomberg News. While US government agencies and officials have long been the targets of state-sponsored espionage campaigns, multiple high-profile breaches have surfaced over the past year.

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We hear from court-scolded Jerome Dewald, who insists lawyer-bots have a future

Interview The founder of an AI startup who attempted to use an artificially generated avatar to argue his case in court has been scolded by a judge for the stunt.…

New submitter toutankh writes: The UK government is developing a tool to predict murder. The scheme was originally called the "homicide prediction project", but its name has been changed to "sharing data to improve risk assessment". The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it "chilling and dystopian".The existence of the project was uncovered by Statewatch rather than announced by the UK government. PR following this discovery looks like uncoordinated damage control: one stated goal is to "ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis", but a spokesperson also said that it is "for research purpose[s] only". One criticism is that such a system will inevitably reproduce existing bias from the police. What could go wrong?

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Microsoft has scrapped plans to build three data center campuses in Licking County, Ohio, in a $1 billion investment pullback, the company said. The canceled developments in New Albany, Heath, and Hebron join a growing list of Microsoft data center project cancellations across the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the United Kingdom. Microsoft will retain ownership of the land and plans to eventually develop the sites at an unspecified future date. Two properties will remain available for farming in the interim.

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A novel way to encourage upgrades? Microsoft would never stoop so low

Patch Tuesday Patch Tuesday has arrived, and Microsoft has revealed one flaw in its products under active exploitation and 11 critical issues in its code to fix.…

Razer's upcoming Blade 16 and other laptops are no longer available for preorder or purchase on its US site. From a report: The configurator for preordering its new Blade 16 laptop was available as recently as April 1st, according to the Internet Archive -- one day before the Trump administration announced sweeping US tariffs on China, Taiwan, and others that make laptop components. When asked recently if tariffs might affect Razer's prices or availability, its Public Relations Manager, Andy Johnston, told The Verge, "We do not have a comment at this stage regarding tariffs." Razer may not be openly talking about the impact of tariffs, but Framework halted sales of its entry-level Laptop 13 in the US on April 7th, and Micron reportedly confirmed surcharges for its memory chips will apply once the tariffs take effect after midnight tonight.

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What did we learn today, hm?

TSMC could end up paying $1 billion or more to settle a US investigation into whether the Taiwanese outfit busted sanctions by indirectly producing AI accelerators for America's bête noire / hēi yáng, Huawei.…

Built by 2028? Maybe. Powering homes? That’s another licence entirely

Canadian nuclear regulators have approved an Ontario company's request to build a single small modular reactor - the first such license issued in the country. But with the chosen design yet to be operated anywhere in the world, it's best to take the news with a heap of salt.…

Did Facebook giant rizz up LLM to win over human voters? It appears so

Meta submitted a specially crafted, non-public variant of its Llama 4 AI model to an online benchmark that may have unfairly boosted its leaderboard position over rivals.…

'Loss of safe separation between aircraft, collision, or runway incursion' is not what we want to hear

Boeing issued a software patch for the VHF radio systems used on its 787 aircraft, and the update turned out to be ineffective, Qatar Airways has complained.…