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Computer maker Dell's staff numbers have fallen by 25,000 in the last two years. In its latest 10-K filing, published on Tuesday, the company said that it had about 108,000 global employees as of January 31, 2025. In February 2024, that number was 120,000, marking a 10% annual reduction in the workforce. From a report: Looking back two years, Dell's head count stood at 133,000, meaning that since February 2023, the Texas-based tech company has reduced its workforce by 19%. The decline in Dell's head count comes after a year of both layoffs and RTO mandates. In August, the company significantly restructured its sales division, which it told workers was necessary to prepare for "the world of AI." As part of the restructuring, Dell laid off workers, though it did not specify how many.

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MORSE to pay -- .. .-.. .-.. .. --- -. ... for failing to meet cyber-grade

A US defense contractor will cough up $4.6 million to settle complaints it failed to meet cybersecurity requirements on military contracts and knowingly submitted false claims for payment.…

Microsoft has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence. From a report: The analysts, who rattled investors with a February note highlighting leases Microsoft had abandoned in the US, said the latest move also reflected the company's choice to forgo some new business from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which it has backed with some $13 billion. Microsoft and the startup earlier this year said they had altered their multiyear agreement, letting OpenAI use cloud-computing services from other companies, provided Microsoft didn't want the business itself. Microsoft's retrenchment in the last six months included lease cancellations and deferrals, the TD Cowen analysts said in their latest research note, dated Wednesday. Alphabet's Google had stepped in to grab some leases Microsoft abandoned in Europe, the analysts wrote, while Meta Platforms had scooped up some of the freed capacity in Europe.

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Victims' details at risk after criminals download 9,000 files from court database

Australian police are currently investigating the theft of "sensitive" data from a New South Wales court system after they confirmed approximately 9,000 files were stolen.…

The United States has won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine than any other nation, with the UK and Germany following in second and third place, according to an analysis of nearly 900 prize-winning publications. Universities account for roughly three-fourths of Nobel Prize-winning research, with a small number of elite institutions producing a disproportionate share of winners. Cambridge University leads with 32 prizes, followed by Harvard (22) and Columbia (13). While prizes are concentrated among researchers from the US, UK, and Germany, 43 countries have produced at least one scientific Nobel laureate. Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, Japan leads with 11 prizes, while Argentina, China, and India have only one or two each. The average age of Nobel Prize winners has steadily increased from about 45 in the 1920s to 65 in the 2010s, though the age at which scientists perform their groundbreaking work has remained relatively constant at around 40.

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Here's one more reason to cling to a steady job: It doesn't pay to quit. From a report: Typically workers who snag a new position see higher pay bumps than those holding down the same job. But in February, median wage growth of 4.4% for job stayers surpassed a 4.2% gain for job switchers, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The change, as measured by a three-month moving average, is yet another sign of a softening labor market. White collar workers have been clinging to their jobs in the face of widespread layoffs and workplace reductions. Last month, employers announced the fastest pace of job cuts since 2020, when factoring in government job losses. And now an oversupply of job seekers means workers are having to settle for smaller pay bumps, said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "That certainly sounds like a big slackening of the job market," Cappelli said. It's a major reversal from the "Great Resignation" a few years ago, when workers left their jobs at unprecedented rates, demanding more benefits and higher pay from employers. At a peak in July 2022, workers who got new jobs saw their wages grow by a whopping 8.5% compared to 5.9% for those who stayed loyal to their company, Atlanta Fed data show.

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It's not a party until someone builds a bit barn on greenbelt land

It's International Datacenter Day, when people around the world get together to share their love of faceless concrete edifices.…

Signal president Meredith Whittaker challenged recent assertions by WhatsApp head Will Cathcart that minimal differences exist between the two messaging platforms' privacy protections. "We're amused to see WhatsApp stretching the limits of reality to claim that they are just like Signal," Whittaker said in a statement published Monday, responding to Cathcart's comments to Dutch journalists last week. While WhatsApp licenses Signal's end-to-end encryption technology, Whittaker said that WhatsApp still collects substantial user metadata, including "location data, contact lists, when they send someone a message, when they stop, what users are in their group chats, their profile picture, and much more." Cathcart had previously stated that WhatsApp doesn't track users' communications or share contact information with other companies, claiming "we strongly believe in private communication."

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Bad news about the Linux system monitor may be on the way

Veteran sysadmin and tech blogger Rachel Kroll posted a cryptic warning yesterday about a popular Linux system monitoring tool. Maybe it's better to be safe than sorry.…

Streaming platforms are increasingly indistinguishable to consumers despite high brand awareness, according to Hub Entertainment Research. The annual Evolution of Video Branding report shows major services like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and Max experiencing year-over-year declines in viewers' ability to articulate what makes each platform unique. Fewer consumers (37% in 2025, down from 41% in 2023) report signing up for services to watch specific shows, while many can't correctly identify where signature programs like Game of Thrones or The Bear can be viewed. While 58% know Stranger Things streams on Netflix, less than half can properly place other major titles.

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Now the only nonsense printed out will come from the user

Months after releasing a patch that left some printers spouting gibberish, Microsoft is issuing another update to deal with it.…

Transport for London will ban most e-bikes across its network from March 31 amid growing safety concerns over battery fires, the transport authority announced on Wednesday. The ban, covering London Underground, Overground, Elizabeth Line and DLR trains, exempts only folding e-bikes, which are considered less likely to have been modified and pose a reduced safety risk. TfL implemented the measure following union strike threats after several incidents, including an e-bike that exploded into flames at Rayners Lane Underground platform last month. The train drivers' union Aslef said the incident could have caused mass casualties.

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Bad news for American tech businesses making money off deals with sanction-dodging companies

The US government has initiated another crackdown on Chinese businesses skirting chip export bans, adding a few dozen new names, and offshoots of repeat offenders, to the entity list.…

A U.S. appeals court has ruled that Apple cannot participate in Google's upcoming antitrust trial, potentially jeopardizing a $20 billion annual deal between the tech giants. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that Apple waited too long to join the proceedings, filing its request 33 days after the government proposed remedies in the case Google lost last August. "The delay seems difficult to justify," the judges ruled. While Apple can still submit written testimony and file friend-of-court briefs, it cannot present evidence or cross-examine witnesses as it had sought. At stake is Google's practice of paying Apple approximately $20 billion annually to remain the default search engine in Safari browsers across Apple devices. The government's proposed remedies would make such arrangements impermissible.

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Half a century later, there's a Moon rocket behind those same doors

It is 50 years since the very last Saturn rocket rolled out from NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to launchpad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Scientists scrutinizing the seafloor beneath a calving iceberg found a remarkable array of living creatures, switching up notions of how the giant chunks of ice affect their immediate environs. The scientists investigated a region of seafloor recently exposed by the calving of a gigantic iceberg -- A-84 -- which is as large as Chicago. The team found a surprisingly vibrant community of critters on the seafloor below where A-84 was once attached to an ice shelf attached to Antarctica. Without the 197-square-mile (510-square-kilometer) iceberg in the way, the team was able to scrutinize the seafloor at depths of 4,265 feet (1,300 meters) using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) SuBastian. The team found large corals and sponges supporting other lifeforms, including icefish, giant sea spiders, and octopus. [...] With the icebergs covering the seafloor, organisms below the shelf cannot get nutrients for survival from the surface. The team hypothesized that ocean currents are a critical driver for life beneath the ice sheets. The team also collected data on the larger ice sheet, whose shrinking size spells concern for the animals that live beneath it.

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Meanwhile, Apple is lining up '$1B' of Nvidia Blackwell Ultra kit

Schneider Electric plans to spend $700 million through 2027 to expand its US operations and bolster the supply of its power equipment necessary to sustain the proliferation of AI datacenters.…

Who knew social media stars had a role to play in building national cyber resilience?

The world's biggest brands have benefited from influencer marketing for years – now the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has hopped on the bandwagon to preach two-factor authentication (2FA) to the masses.…

At last, cell service from SPAAAAAACE

Britain's telecoms regulator could authorize satellite-to-smartphone services in the UK before the end of this year.…

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Google late Tuesday rushed out a patch for a sandbox escape vulnerability in its flagship Chrome browser after researchers at Kaspersky caught a professional hacking operation launching drive-by download exploits. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-2783, was chained with a second exploit for remote code execution in what appears to be a nation-state sponsored cyberespionage campaign [dubbed Operation ForumTroll] targeting organizations in Russia. Kaspersky said it detected a series of infections triggered by phishing emails in the middle of March and traced the incidents to a zero-day that fired when victims simply clicked on a booby-trapped website from a Chrome browser. The Russian anti-malware vendor said victims merely had to click on a personalized, short-lived link, and their systems were compromised when the malicious website was opened in Chrome. Kaspersky said its exploit detection tools picked up on the zero-day, and after reverse-engineering the code, the team reported the bug to Google and coordinated the fix released on Tuesday.

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