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With no staff, no funding, and the contract closed, it looks a lot like limbo

The UK's long-promised "Single Trade Window" has quietly run out of steam after burning through more than £111 million ($150 million), with officials confirming the program has been "brought to early closure."…

Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons. The current lineup -- the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 -- still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated action buttons to navigate a tablet-like screen perched atop the dashboard. Upper-trim CX-70 and CX-90 models do have 12.3-inch touchscreens, but touch input only works when parked and only inside CarPlay; it disables automatically once the car is in drive. The new CX-5 goes the other direction entirely, eliminating all hard buttons including the volume knob and physical climate controls that current models still offer. Mazda says the touchscreen is safe because core functions like climate are pinned to a persistent bottom bar -- an approach Ford, Rivian, and most of the industry adopted years ago.

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$200K role promises authority, mission, and 'zero patience for theater'

The Trump administration is looking for a deputy federal CIO, and theater fans need not apply.…

The software industry's decades-old habit of charging companies a flat fee for every employee who uses a product is running into a fundamental problem: AI agents don't sit in chairs, and they don't need licences. As autonomous agents take on tasks that human workers once handled, the per-seat pricing model that made SaaS revenue so predictable is giving way to consumption-based and hybrid alternatives. Snowflake and Databricks (valued at $134 billion) already charge based on usage. Salesforce initially priced its Agentforce customer relations bot at $2 per conversation but faced customer pushback and now offers action-based pricing, upfront credits and fixed fees. ServiceNow's finance chief Amit Zavery said last month that some customers aren't ready for purely consumption-based models. Goldman Sachs estimates US software spending will nearly triple to $2.8 trillion by 2037 as automated tasks blur the boundary between IT and wage budgets, but that money will no longer arrive in the neat recurring instalments that investors and private equity firms have come to expect.

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Valve has updated the Steam Deck website to say that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock "intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages." From a report: The PC gaming handheld has been out of stock in the US and other parts of the world for a few days, and thanks to this update, we now know why. The update comes shortly after Valve delayed the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller from a planned shipping window of early 2026 because of the memory and storage crunch. "We have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change," Valve said in a post about that announcement from earlier this month. Its goal is to launch that new hardware sometime in the first half of 2026, and the company is working to finalize its plans "as soon as possible."

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Keep behavioral tracking American? PC giant says the claim is 'false'

A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China.…

Police say seized kit contained logins, passwords, and server IP addresses

Polish police have arrested and charged a man over ties to the Phobos ransomware group following a property raid.…

Repo mirrors now open for business

Gentoo's official migration from Microsoft-owned GitHub to Codeberg is underway, as the Linux distribution fulfills a pledge to ditch the code shack due to "continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."…

Sony Group has developed a technology that can identify the underlying music used in tunes generated by AI, making it possible for songwriters to seek compensation from AI developers if their music was used. From a report: Sony Group's technology analyzes which musicians' songs were used in learning and generating music. It can quantify the contribution of each original work, such as "30% of the music used by the Beatles and 10% by Queen," for example. If the AI developer agrees to cooperate for the analysis, Sony Group will obtain data by connecting to the developer's base model system. When cooperation is not attainable, the technology estimates the original work by comparing AI-generated music with existing music. The AI boom has sparked numerous cases in which AI developers are accused of using copyrighted music, video and writing without permission to train machines. In the music industry, AI-generated songs using the voices of well-known singers have been distributed online. The Japanese company thinks the technology will help create a system that distributes revenue generated by AI music to original songwriters based on their contribution.

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Boards demand measurable ROI as budgets, bonuses, and jobs hang in the balance

The clock is ticking for AI projects to either prove their worth or face the chopping block.…

Digital burglaries remain routine, and data shows most corps still don't stick to basic infosec standards

Britain is telling businesses to "lock the door" on cybercrims as new government data suggests most still haven't even found the latch.…

Social media platform’s legal eagles prepare to fight ever-growing number of countries

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is the latest regulator to open an investigation into Elon Musk's X following repeated reports of harmful image generation by the platform's Grok AI chatbot.…

Outsourcer tells MPs AI is prioritizing cases as thousands of civil servants face delays

Capita is banking on Microsoft Copilot to help rescue the backlog of cases it has inherited in taking over the UK Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS).…

Won't replace traditional CI/CD – and still in early development – so use 'at your own risk'

Agentic workflows - where an AI agent runs automatically in GitHub Actions - are now in technical preview, following their introduction at the Universe event in San Francisco last year.…

Top brass splash cash on acoustic targeting, hypersonic missiles…and Red Hat

Keir Starmer could ramp up the UK's defense spending plans faster than planned as the MoD reeled off new purchases for Britain's armed forces.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. The chamber emailed its members on Monday to say it had disabled "built-in artificial intelligence features" on corporate tablets after its IT department assessed it couldn't guarantee the security of the tools' data. "Some of these features use cloud services to carry out tasks that could be handled locally, sending data off the device," the Parliament's e-MEP tech support desk said in the email. "As these features continue to evolve and become available on more devices, the full extent of data shared with service providers is still being assessed. Until this is fully clarified, it is considered safer to keep such features disabled."

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Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive. From a report: Stats compiled by market watcher Context show sales of refurbished PCs via distribution climbed 7 percent in calendar Q4 across five of the biggest European markets -- Italy, the UK, Germany, Spain, and France. Affordability is the primary driver in the secondhand segment, the analyst says, with around 40 percent of sales driven by budget-conscious users shopping in the $235 to $355 price band for laptops. The $355 to $475 tier is also expanding -- representing 23 percent of the refurbished market, up from 15 percent a year earlier -- indicating some buyers are prepared to spend a bit more for improved specifications.

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To advance the ‘ambient internet of things’ – no batteries required

A quartet of Japanese organisations plan to build “advanced ambient internet of things systems” using a newly approved ISO standard.…

The music industry's long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone -- roughly 39% of the French service's daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month. Streaming services now host 253 million songs, according to Luminate's most recent annual report, after adding 51 million tracks over the course of 2025 at an average pace of 106,000 uploads a day. Spotify has already responded by requiring songs to hit at least 1,000 plays in the previous 12 months to qualify for royalties, and Luminate reported that 88% of tracks received 1,000 or fewer plays in 2025. The distribution layer is in flux too: Universal Music Group is trying to acquire Downtown Music, owner of DIY distributor CD Baby, TuneCore's head recently stepped down without a planned replacement, and DistroKid is reportedly up for sale.

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Your chance to run a VM inside a VM, inside a cloud – which can mean WSL on a cloudy Windows PC

Amazon Web Services has enabled nested virtualization for a handful of EC2 instances.…