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Global sales of smartwatches have fallen for the first time, new figures indicate, in large part due to a sharp decline in the popularity of market leader, Apple. From a report: Market research firm Counterpoint says 7% fewer of the devices were shipped in 2024 compared to the year before. Shipments of Apple Watches fell by 19% in that period, Counterpoint says. It blames the slump on a lack of new features in Apple's latest devices, and the fact a rumoured high-end Ultra 3 model never materialised.

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The Federal Trade Commission asked a judge in Seattle to delay the start of its trial accusing Amazon of duping consumers into signing up for its Prime program, citing resource constraints. CNBC: Attorneys for the FTC made the request during a status hearing on Wednesday before Judge John Chun in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. Chun had set a Sept. 22 start date for the trial. Jonathan Cohen, an attorney for the FTC, asked Chun for a two-month continuance on the case due to staffing and budgetary shortfalls. The FTC's request to delay due to staffing constraints comes amid a push by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency to reduce spending. DOGE, which is led by tech baron Elon Musk, has slashed the federal government's workforce by more than 62,000 workers in February alone. "We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on our case team," Cohen said.

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AI doesn't run on fairy dust after all

A group of large-scale energy users including Amazon, Meta, and Google has thrown its weight behind efforts to ramp up global nuclear capacity – aiming to triple it by 2050 – to meet increasing energy demands.…

Schools across the United States are increasingly using artificial intelligence to monitor students' online activities, raising significant privacy concerns after Vancouver Public Schools inadvertently released nearly 3,500 unredacted, sensitive student documents to reporters. The surveillance software, developed by companies like Gaggle Safety Management, scans school-issued devices 24/7 for signs of bullying, self-harm, or violence, alerting staff when potential issues are detected. Approximately 1,500 school districts nationwide use Gaggle's technology to track six million students, with Vancouver schools paying $328,036 for three years of service. While school officials maintain the technology has helped counselors intervene with at-risk students, documents revealed LGBTQ+ students were potentially outed to administrators through the monitoring.

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Project dubbed 'wasteful' – Musk's lot says under-pressure VA must do it 'in-house'

Elon Musk's newly minted US Department of Government Efficiency claims to have helped the Department of Veterans Affairs end a technology contract run by service-disabled veterans.…

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has publicly disagreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's prediction that AI will write 90% of code within 3-6 months, estimating instead that only "20-30% of code could get written by AI." "Are there some really simple use cases? Yes, but there's an equally complicated number of ones where it's going to be zero," Krishna said during an onstage interview at SXSW. He argued AI will boost programmer productivity rather than eliminate jobs. "If you can do 30% more code with the same number of people, are you going to get more code written or less?" he asked. "History has shown that the most productive company gains market share, and then you can produce more products."

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Roomba maker iRobot has warned it may cease operations within 12 months unless it can refinance debt or find a buyer, just one day after launching a new vacuum cleaner line. In its March 12 quarterly report, the company disclosed it had spent $3.6 million to amend terms on a $200 million Carlyle Group loan from 2023, as U.S. revenue plunged 47% in the fourth quarter. "Given these uncertainties and the implication they may have on the Company's financials, there is substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern for a period of at least 12 months from the date of the issuance of its consolidated 2024 financial statements," the company wrote. The robot vacuum pioneer has initiated a formal strategic review after a failed Amazon acquisition, the departure of founder Colin Angle, and layoffs affecting over half its workforce. iRobot cited mounting competition from Chinese manufacturers and expects continued losses for "the foreseeable future."

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Artist formerly known as OpenStack to huddle under same umbrella as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The votes are in, confirming that the Open Infrastructure Foundation intends to join the Linux Foundation.…

Morgan Stanley has reduced its iPhone shipment forecasts after Apple confirmed the delay of a more advanced Siri personal assistant, dampening prospects for accelerating phone upgrades. The investment bank now predicts 230 million iPhone shipments in 2025 (flat year-over-year) and 243 million in 2026 (up 6%), down from previous estimates. An upgraded Siri was the most sought-after Apple Intelligence feature among prospective buyers, according to the bank's survey data. "Access to Advanced AI Features" appeared as a top-five driver of smartphone upgrades for the first time, with about 50% of iPhone owners who didn't upgrade to iPhone 16 citing the delayed Apple Intelligence rollout as affecting their decision. The firm also incorporated headwinds from China tariffs in its assessment, noting Apple is unlikely to fully offset these costs without broader exemptions.

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Fewer than 10 known victims, but Mandiant suspects others compromised, too

Chinese spies have for months exploited old Juniper Networks routers, infecting the buggy gear with custom backdoors and gaining root access to the compromised devices.…

Amazon, Alphabet's Google and Meta Platforms on Wednesday said they support efforts to at least triple nuclear energy worldwide by 2050. From a report: The tech companies signed a pledge first adopted in December 2023 by more than 20 countries, including the U.S., at the U.N. Climate Change Conference. Financial institutions including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley backed the pledge last year. The pledge is nonbinding, but highlights the growing support for expanding nuclear power among leading industries, finance and governments. Amazon, Google and Meta are increasingly important drivers of energy demand in the U.S. as they build out AI centers. The tech sector is turning to nuclear power after concluding that renewables alone won't provide enough reliable power for their energy needs. Microsoft and Apple did not sign the statement.

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Yokohama release also adds meta-observabiilty and takes a tilt at CRM

ServiceNow has for years used the example of employee onboarding to explain the power of its wares, pointing out that a lot of people around an organization are needed to get new hires on the payroll, registered with HR, equipped with a computer, and assigned appropriate permissions to access applications.…

Power utility GM talks to El Reg about getting that call and what happened next

Nick Lawler, general manager of the Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments (LELWD), was at home one Friday when he got a call from the FBI alerting him that the public power utility's network had been compromised. The digital intruders turned out to be Volt Typhoon.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: New York State has sued Allstate Insurance for operating websites so badly designed they would deliver personal information in plain-text to anyone that went looking for it. The data was lifted from Allstate's National General business unit, which ran a website for consumers who wanted to get a quote for a policy. That task required users to input a name and address, and once that info was entered, the site searched a LexisNexis Risk Solutions database for data on anyone who lived at the address provided. The results of that search would then appear on a screen that included the driver's license number (DLN) for the given name and address, plus "names of any other drivers identified as potentially living at that consumer's address, and the entire DLNs of those other drivers." Naturally, miscreants used the system to mine for people's personal information for fraud. "National General intentionally built these tools to automatically populate consumers' entire DLNs in plain text -- in other words, fully exposed on the face of the quoting websites -- during the quoting process," the court documents [PDF] state. "Not surprisingly, attackers identified this vulnerability and targeted these quoting tools as an easy way to access the DLNs of many New Yorkers," according to the lawsuit. The digital thieves then used this information to "submit fraudulent claims for pandemic and unemployment benefits," we're told. ... [B]y the time the insurer resolved the mess, crooks had built bots that harvested at least 12,000 individuals' driver's license numbers from the quote-generating site.

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Agency willing to take huge risks with human exploration, but not willing to do it for some dirt?

Rocket Lab has been on a roll lately, with multiple Electron launches, plans for an ocean platform for its Neutron rocket, and a second mission for in-space manufacturing business Varda under its belt. However, NASA has apparently rejected the company's Mars Sample Return mission proposal. Why?…

Don't, don't, DON'T believe the hype

The developer of Free95 says it will be a free Windows 95-compatible OS, but we suspect an elaborate prank. At best, maybe an unknowing one.…

Leaders call for fewer contractors and more top talent installed across government

Senior officials in the UK's civil service understand that future cyber hires in Whitehall will need to be paid a salary higher than that of the Prime Minister if the government wants to get serious about fending off attacks.…

AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: The U.S. installed 50 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in over two decades. That's enough to power 8.5 million households. According to the U.S. Solar Market Insight 2024 Year in Review report (PDF) released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, solar and storage account for 84% of all new electric generating capacity added to the grid last year. In addition to historic deployment, surging U.S. solar manufacturing emerged as a landmark economic story in 2024. Domestic solar module production tripled last year, and at full capacity, U.S. factories can now produce enough to meet nearly all demand for solar panels in the U.S. Solar cell manufacturing also resumed in 2024, strengthening the U.S. energy supply chain. [...] Total US solar capacity is expected to reach 739 GW by 2035, but the report forecasts include scenarios showing how policy changes could impact the solar market. [...] The low case forecast shows a 130 GW decline in solar deployment over the next decade compared to the base case, representing nearly $250 billion of lost investment.

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Five years after it launched its first database service, the MySQL fork is trying again

MariaDB says it is building a database-as-a-service based on open source principles after offloading its old DBaaS before going into private ownership.…

Vendors just don't want machines to live double lives

Column My decade-old and very well-travelled 13" MacBook Pro finally died, and I hoped my new-ish M2 iPad Pro could replace it.…