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HP has quietly launched a gaming laptop subscription service called the OMEN Gaming Subscription that lets customers pay a monthly fee to use one of several gaming laptops but never actually own the hardware, even after paying well past the machine's retail price. The service ranges from $50 a month for an HP Victus 15-inch laptop with an RTX 4050 to $130 a month for an Omen Max 16 with an RTX 5080. At current sale prices, subscribers would exceed the cost of buying the laptop outright within 16 to 19 months; at MSRP, that window stretches to roughly 25 months. In exchange for giving up ownership, subscribers get yearly hardware upgrades, next-day replacements, 24/7 support, and an ongoing warranty. There is a 30-day trial period, but cancelling in the second month triggers steep early termination fees -- $550 for the Victus 15 and $1,430 for the Omen Max 16. Cancellation becomes free only after the 13th month. HP also offers accessories like the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless headset as add-on rentals for $8 a month.

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Curious port filtering and traffic patterns suggest advisories weren’t the earliest warning signals sent

Telcos likely received advance warning about January's critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise.…

Sony will ship its last batch of Blu-ray recorders this month, according to Kyodo News, ending the company's decades-long run in a product category it helped create. The recorders targeted exclusively the Japanese domestic market, where households used them to record broadcast television. Sony had already stopped manufacturing the devices and recordable discs about a year ago, and the final shipments are clearing out remaining inventory. Kyodo attributes the segment's death to the rise of streaming services. Sony will continue selling Blu-ray players "for the time being." The broader Blu-ray ecosystem remains intact. Asus, LG, and Pioneer still produce PC drives in internal and external USB form factors. Panasonic and Verbatim continue manufacturing Blu-ray media. The format turned 20 last year, having debuted at CES 2006 -- one year before Netflix launched its streaming platform.

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T-Mobile is opening registration today for a beta test of Live Translation, an AI-powered feature that will translate live phone calls into more than 50 languages when it launches this spring. The feature operates at the network level, so it doesn't require any specific app or device -- beta participants simply dial 87 to activate it on a call. T-Mobile President of Technology and CTO John Saw told The Verge that Live Translation works over VoLTE, VoNR and VoWiFi, meaning it isn't limited to 5G. The only requirement is that a T-Mobile customer must initiate the translation. The beta will be free, though T-Mobile has not said whether the feature will eventually be paywalled.

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Action Plan calls for EU-wide drills, industry forums, and expanded identification requirements

The European Commission wants to see stronger EU-wide cooperation over malicious drones via a new action plan. Proposals include a central counter-drone test facility, changing the current rules governing civilian use, and a development boost to Europe's own drones and counter-drone systems.…

Has the OS also jumped the shark?

Microsoft's Raymond Chen has revealed an unexpected use for the company's lawyers: securing permission from the cast of Happy Days so a Weezer music video could ship on the Windows 95 CD.…

200,000-strong union says spy-tech firm's ICE work undermines patient trust

British doctors are being urged to pull back from the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) after their union called on members to stop non-clinical use of the Palantir-built system.…

Attackers using social engineering to exploit business processes, rather than tunnelling in via tech

Exclusive When fraudsters go after people's paychecks, "every employee on earth becomes a target," according to Binary Defense security sleuth John Dwyer.…

Mac faithful aghast at helpful wallet-emptying suggestions

Apple fanbois are realizing what the Creator Studio subscription means for its productivity apps, and many are unhappy with the direction of travel.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Food and Drug Administration has refused to start a review of Moderna's application for its experimental flu shot, the company announced Tuesday, in another sign of the Trump administration's influence on tightening vaccine regulations in the U.S. Moderna said the move is inconsistent with previous feedback from the agency from before it submitted the application and started phase three trials on the shot, called mRNA-1010. The drugmaker said it has requested a meeting with the FDA to "understand the path forward." Moderna noted that the agency did not identify any specific safety or efficacy issues with the vaccine, but instead objected to the study design, despite previously approving it. The company added that the move won't impact its 2026 financial guidance. Moderna's jab showed positive phase three data last year, meeting all of the trial goals. At the time, Moderna said the stand-alone flu shot was key to its efforts to advance a combination vaccine targeting both influenza and Covid-19.

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Judge agrees with Virtzilla's argument that the case should be heard in the US, not Germany

VMware appears to have secured an early procedural win in the case it brought against German industrial giant Siemens over its alleged use of unlicensed software.…

Smug faces across all those who opposed the WordPad-ification of Microsoft's humble text editor

Just months after Microsoft added Markdown support to Notepad, researchers have found the feature can be abused to achieve remote code execution (RCE).…

Report warns skills shortages and grid bottlenecks threaten to stall region's capacity push

Only 20 percent of datacenters are considered AI-ready across Europe and the Middle East, despite the growing demand for infrastructure to accelerate AI processing.…

Breaking a big hard problem up into smaller ones? That'll never catch on

FOSDEM 2026 Isaac Freund's River compositor brings a little old-fashioned modularity and customizability to the brave new Wayland world.…

If launching it was crazy in 1999, then what's trying to use it today?

FOSDEM 2026 Michal Pleban knows his old kit inside out, and his talk on the CIDCO MailStation was one of the most interesting of FOSDEM for us – as well as the funniest.…

UK government grilled over progress made to prevent a second life-threatening leak

Legacy IT issues are hampering key technical measures designed to prevent highly sensitive data leaks, UK government officials say.…

Discord has moved to calm a user backlash over its upcoming age verification mandate by clarifying that the "vast majority" of people will never be asked to confirm their age through a face scan or government ID. The platform said it will instead rely on an internal "age prediction" model that draws on account information, device and activity data, and behavioral patterns across its communities to estimate whether someone is an adult. Users whose age the model cannot confidently determine will still need to submit a video selfie or ID. Those not verified as adults or identified as under 18 will be placed in a "teen-appropriate" experience that blocks access to age-restricted servers and channels. The clarification came after users threatened to leave the platform and cancel Nitro subscriptions, and after a third-party vendor used by Discord for age verification suffered a data breach last year that exposed user information and a small number of uploaded ID cards.

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The Chocolate Factory isn't showing ads in Gemini, but AI Mode is fair game

As OpenAI walks the advertising tightrope to balance revenue gains against credibility and safety, ad kingpin Google is roaring ahead to use AI to improve its advertising products.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn't that AI will take your job. It's that AI will save you from it. That's the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, the argument goes, AI is a force multiplier. You become a more capable, more indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst -- and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins. But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn't a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines. As part of what they describe as "in-progress research," UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company watching what happened when workers genuinely embraced AI. What they found across more than 40 "in-depth" interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees' to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

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Because AI won’t only run in Big Tech’s giant GPU garages, and won't tolerate slow connections

The Open Compute Project (OCP) wants to develop specs for distributed datacenters and has decided the all-optical Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) stack can make them possible.…