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That's Mutual Assured AI Malfunction in the race for superintelligence

ANALYSIS Former Google chief Eric Schmidt says the US should refrain from pursuing a latter-day "Manhattan Project" to gain AI supremacy, as this will provoke preemptive cyber responses from rivals such as China that could lead to escalation.…

Budget carrier Ryanair has delayed its move to 100% paperless boarding passes to the start of its winter schedule on November 3. From a report: Media reports had suggested that the change could come in May, ahead of the busy summer season. But the implementation will now begin at the start of the winter season in November, and means Ryanair passengers will no longer download and print a physical paper boarding pass. Instead they will use the digital boarding pass generated in their 'myRyanair' app during check-in. Currently almost 80% of Ryanair's 200 million annual passengers already use this digital boarding pass. As a result of this initiative, Ryanair expects to eliminate almost all airport check-in fees from November, as all passengers will have checked-in online or in-app to generate their digital boarding pass. The airline said it will also reduce passengers' carbon footprint by eliminating unnecessary paper, saving more than 300 tonnes in paper waste each year.

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No 'zero days without incident' sign for Microsoft thanks ongoing problems

Problems with Outlook.com are continuing, with users reporting being unable to access their emails or authenticate themselves.…

NASA has begun shutting down science instruments aboard the twin Voyager spacecraft to extend their 47-year journey through interstellar space, officials said. Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem was deactivated on February 25, while Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument will be shut down on March 24. Both spacecraft will then operate with just three of their original ten science instruments. The radioisotope power systems aboard the Voyagers lose approximately 4 watts annually, threatening to end their mission within months without intervention. "Electrical power is running low," said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd. "The Voyagers have been deep space rock stars since launch, and we want to keep it that way as long as possible." NASA engineers believe these measures could enable the probes to continue operating into the 2030s, far beyond their initial five-year design life.

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A U.S. congressional committee has urged Americans to remove Chinese-made wireless routers from their homes, including those made by TP-Link, calling them a security threat that opened the door for China to hack U.S. critical infrastructure. From a report: The House of Representatives Select Committee on China has pushed the Commerce Department to investigate China's TP-Link Technology Co, which according to research firm IDC is the top seller of WiFi routers internationally by unit volume. U.S. authorities are considering a ban on the sale of the company's routers, according to media reports. Rob Joyce, former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, told Wednesday's committee hearing that TP-Link devices exposed individuals to cyber intrusion that hackers could use to gain leverage to attack critical infrastructure. "We need to all take action and replace those devices so they don't become the tools that are used in the attacks on the U.S.," Joyce said, adding that he understood the Commerce Department was considering a ban.

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Akira really wasn't horsing around with this one

Toronto Zoo's final update on its January 2024 cyberattack arrived this week, revealing that visitor data going back to 2000 had been compromised.…

A quarter of startups in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI, YC managing partner Jared Friedman said. "Every one of these people is highly technical, completely capable of building their own products from scratch. A year ago, they would have built their product from scratch -- but now 95% of it is built by an AI," Friedman said. YC CEO Garry Tan warned that AI-generated code may face challenges at scale and developers need classical coding skills to sustain products. He predicted: "This isn't a fad. This is the dominant way to code."

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Attacks strike, facilities go bust, patients die. But it's preventable

It will cost upward of $75 million to address the cybersecurity needs of rural US hospitals, Microsoft reckons, as mounting closures threaten the lives of Americans.…

AmiMoJo writes: China plans to issue guidance to encourage the use of open-source RISC-V chips nationwide for the first time, Reuters reports, citing two sources briefed on the matter, as Beijing accelerates efforts to curb the country's dependence on Western-owned technology. The policy guidance on boosting the use of RISC-V chips could be released as soon as this month, although the final date could change, the sources said. It is being drafted jointly by eight government bodies, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the China National Intellectual Property Administration, they added.

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Veteran probes close in on the half century

More science instruments are being shut down on the Voyager probes as engineers attempt to eke out the power and keep them running for years to come.…

Global giants shouldn't be allowed to make 'committed spend' public sector deals and make discounts we cannot match

Britain's competition regulator is facing biting criticism from local cloud providers for declining to act on Committed Spend Agreements (CSAs), the sales tools that AWS and Microsoft use to lure customers.…

In a policy paper, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks said that the U.S. should not pursue a Manhattan Project-style push to develop AI systems with "superhuman" intelligence, also known as AGI. From a report: The paper, titled "Superintelligence Strategy," asserts that an aggressive bid by the U.S. to exclusively control superintelligent AI systems could prompt fierce retaliation from China, potentially in the form of a cyberattack, which could destabilize international relations. "[A] Manhattan Project [for AGI] assumes that rivals will acquiesce to an enduring imbalance or omnicide rather than move to prevent it," the co-authors write. "What begins as a push for a superweapon and global control risks prompting hostile countermeasures and escalating tensions, thereby undermining the very stability the strategy purports to secure."

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You were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them!

Brother is the latest printer manufacturer to come under fire over alleged sharp practices around the use of third-party consumables versus its own ink supplies.…

Jailbreak it, or even gut it and turn its screen into a low-power portable display with a Modos e-ink controller

FOSDEM 2025 Amazon's Kindle e-readers just got a bit less useful, but help is at hand, from jailbreaking to making one of the devices into a monitor.…

Physicist and media darling argues partnership with NASA too prone to political whim

The UK should hitch its cosmic wagon to the European space agency and contribute more cash to the intergovernmental body, professor Brian Cox, musician, media luvvie and Manchester University particle physicist, told the UK's second Parliamentary chamber this week.…

India's income tax department will gain powers to access citizens' social media accounts, emails and other digital spaces beginning April 2026 under the new income tax bill, in a significant expansion of its search and seizure authority. The legislation, which has raised privacy concerns among legal experts, allows tax officers to "gain access by overriding the access code" to computer systems and "virtual digital spaces" if they suspect tax evasion. The bill broadly defines virtual digital spaces to include email servers, social media accounts, online investment accounts, banking platforms, and cloud servers. "The expansion raises significant concerns regarding constitutional validity, potential state overreach, and practical enforcement," Sonam Chandwani, Managing Partner at KS Legal and Associates, told Indian newspaper Economic Times.

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This time we mean it for the Windows chatbot

Microsoft has revamped its Copilot app on Windows once again, this time insisting it really has gone native.…

No, your car can't navigate in space. But perhaps colonies can find their way without dedicated lunar GPS

An experimental module attached to Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Moon lander successfully used Earth's orbiting satnav systems, a feat that suggests a specialized lunar positioning system may not be needed.…

Goldman Sachs, in a research note Thursday (the note isn't publicly posted): Annualized revenue for public companies exposed to the build-out of AI infrastructure increased by over $340 billion from 2022 through 2024Q4 (and is projected to increase by almost $580 billion by end-2025). In contrast, annualized real investment in AI-related categories in the US GDP accounts has only risen by $42 billion over the same period. This sharp divergence has prompted questions from investors about why US GDP is not receiving a larger boost from AI. A large share of the nominal revenue increase reported by public companies reflects cost inflation (particularly for semiconductors) and foreign revenue, neither of which should boost real US GDP. Indeed, we find that margin expansion ($30 billion) and increased revenue from other countries ($130 billion) account for around half of the publicly reported AI spending surge. That said, the BEA's (Bureau of Economic Analysis) methodology potentially understates the impact of AI-related investment on real GDP by around $100 billion. Manufacturing shipments and net imports imply that US semiconductor supply has increased by over $35 billion since 2022, but the BEA records semiconductor purchases as intermediate inputs rather than investment (since semiconductors have historically been embedded in products that are later resold) and therefore excludes them from GDP. Cloud services used to train and support AI models are similarly mostly recorded as intermediate inputs. Combined, we find that these explanations can explain most of the AI investment discrepancy, with only $50 billion unexplained. Looking ahead, we see more scope for AI-related investment to provide a moderate boost to real US GDP in 2025 since AI investment should broaden to categories like data centers, servers and networking hardware, and utilities that will likely be captured as real investment. However, we expect the bulk of investment in semiconductors and cloud computing will remain unmeasured barring changes to US national account methodology.

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While we’re talking open source V12N, meet SEAPATH: A new hypervisor for electricity grids backed by Red Hat

The Xen Project has delivered an update to its flagship hypervisor.…