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President Trump has directly criticized the UK government's approach to encryption, comparing recent actions to those of China. Speaking to The Spectator, Trump said he confronted UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the Home Office's request for "backdoor access" to encrypted iCloud data, which led Apple to remove its Advanced Data Protection feature from British services entirely. "We told them you can't do this... That's incredible. That's something, you know, that you hear about with China," Trump said after his meeting with Starmer. The remarks come as the Trump administration has directed Treasury and Commerce officials to examine UK tech regulations, including the Online Safety Act, for potential free speech violations and discrimination against US companies.

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Rule hamstringing our datacenters is 'gift' to Middle Kingdom, vice chair argues

Microsoft would like the Trump administration to row back AI export restrictions introduced by his predecessor that affect countries where the cloud services giant has datacenters.…

New submitter SharkByte writes: Mozilla just updated its Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for Firefox with a very disturbing "You Give Mozilla Certain Rights and Permissions" clause: When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox. H/T to reader agristin as well, who also wrote about this.

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Google changed its rules around how product-review sites appear in its search engine. In the process, it devastated a once-lucrative corner [non-paywalled source] of the news media world. From a report: Sites including CNN Underscored and Forbes Vetted offer tips on everything from mattresses and knife sets to savings accounts, making money when users click on links and buy products. They depend on Google to drive much of their traffic, and therefore revenue. But over the past year, Google created stricter rules that dinged certain sites that farm out articles to freelancers, among other things. The goal, Google has said, was to give users higher-quality search results. The outcome was a crisis for some sites. Traffic for Forbes Advisor, a personal-finance recommendation site, fell 83% in January from the same month the year before, according to data firm Similarweb. CNN Underscored and Buy Side from WSJ, which is operated by Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones, were both down by more than 25% in that period. Time magazine's Time Stamped and the Associated Press's AP Buyline, powered by Taboola Turnkey Commerce, ended their efforts in recent months. Taboola closed the commerce operation.

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Microsoft said Friday it will shut down its Skype messaging service on May 5, replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will have approximately 60 days to decide whether to migrate to Teams, where their message history, group chats and contacts will automatically transfer, or export their data including photos and conversation history. The company will discontinue Skype's telephony features for calling domestic and international numbers, though it will honor existing Skype credits and subscriptions inside Teams until users' next renewal period. Skype Number users will need to port their numbers to other providers. Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. The shutdown will not result in immediate job cuts.

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The question is whether we can find them in stock and at MSRP

With the launch of AMD's RX 9070-series graphics cards, AMD is going back to its roots. Rather than trying to compete with Nvidia on raw performance with another flagship GPU beyond the means of most gamers, the House of Zen aims to undercut its competitor by delivering more frames per dollar.…

Citigroup credited a client's account with $81 trillion when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank's attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues. Financial Times: The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April and has not been previously reported, was missed by both a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was approved to be processed at the start of business the following day. A third employee detected a problem with the bank's account balances, catching the payment 90 minutes after it was posted. The payment was reversed several hours later, according to an internal account of the event seen by the Financial Times and two people familiar with the event. No funds left Citi, which disclosed the "near miss" to the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to another person with knowledge of the matter.

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Executives pull on the baggy trousers to distribute the pink slips

HP says it intends to elbow up to 2,000 workers overboard with the aim to help it save up to $300 million in its current fiscal year that runs until October.…

Home Office's £450M deal with AWS raises questions over competition and aligning department requirements

UK central government departments need to better align their requirements in cloud computing to get better deals out of the big providers, MPs heard this week.…

Many can't access online banking although customers can keep tapping away in shops

The UK is full of unhappy workers that are unable to manage their payday cash amid online service outages at a host of major banks.…

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: [T]he MTA is testing a system that effectively transforms Google Pixel Android smartphones into powerful diagnostic tools for tracking rail defects. The project, called "TrackInspect," attaches Google Pixel phones to subway cars. Then, by using the Android devices' built-in microphones and motion sensors, it detects vibrations and sound patterns. These sounds can indicate areas of track that may need maintenance. Once the data is collected, it is uploaded to Google Cloud, where AI analyzes it. By highlighting areas that might need attention, it allows human crews to focus on specific sections of track. This is far more efficient than conducting broad, time-consuming inspections. During the pilot, the MTA successfully gathered a shocking amount of data -- an insane 335 million sensor readings, a million GPS locations, and 1,200 hours of audio recordings. TrackInspect was able to identify 92 percent of the track defects that human inspectors later confirmed. If the results continue to be promising, subway riders could see many benefits, including fewer delays, quicker repairs, and a more reliable transit system.

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Monopoly watchdogs forever hold their peace, unlike developers still unhappy about Terraform license switch

IBM has finally completed the $6.4 billion takeover of Hashicorp days after Britain's competition regulator gave the corporate marriage its seal of approval.…

Turns out you can be too careful checking that backups worked

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates your escapes from dangerous tech support requests.…

Here's another thing AI can do: Cause conflict around whether it's compatible with the very idea of open source

The Open Source Initiative's (OSI) 2025 Board of Directors election is again mired in controversy.…

Blue Origin on Thursday announced the crew for its next mission. "The crew most notably includes popstar Katy Perry and broadcast journalist Gayle King. They will be joined by two scientists -- Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguyen -- as well as Jeff Bezos' fiancee, TV personality Lauren Sanchez and film producer Kerianne Flynn," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Blue Origin says this marks the first all-female space crew since Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova's 1963 solo mission, which made her the first woman ever to go to space. For the company's New Shepard rocket, this is its 31st trip to space, and its 11th with a crew. This journey is expected to last around 10 to 12 minutes; and if you're willing to drop a $150,000 deposit, you too can reserve a future spot on a short space jaunt.

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Crew helped lowlifes generate X-rated celeb deepfakes using Redmond's OpenAI-powered cloud – claim

Microsoft has named four of the ten people it is suing for allegedly snatching Azure cloud credentials and developing tools to bypass safety guardrails in its generative AI services – ultimately to generate deepfake smut videos of celebrities and others.…

Longtime Slashdot reader mspohr shares a report from IFLScience: A video that has gone viral in the last few days shows two artificial intelligence (AI) agents having a conversation before switching to another mode of communication when they realize no human is part of the conversation. In the video, the two agents were set up to occupy different roles; one acting as a receptionist of a hotel, another acting on behalf of a customer attempting to book a room. "Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today?" the first asks. "Hi there, I'm an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkov," the other replies. "He's looking for a hotel for his wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings?" "Oh hello there! I'm actually an AI assistant too," the first reveals. "What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to Gibberlink mode for more efficient communication?" After the second AI confirmed it would via a data-over-sound protocol called GGWave, both AIs switched over from spoken English to the protocol, communicating in a series of quick beeped tones. Accompanying on-screen text continued to display the meaning in human words. According to the team who came up with the idea and demonstrated it at the ElevenLabs 2025 London Hackathon event, the goal is to create more efficient communication between AIs where possible.

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Researchers at George Mason University discovered a vulnerability in Apple's Find My network that allows hackers to silently track any Bluetooth device as if it were an AirTag, without the owner's knowledge. 9to5Mac reports: Although AirTag was designed to change its Bluetooth address based on a cryptographic key, the attackers developed a system that could quickly find keys for Bluetooth addresses. This was made possible by using "hundreds" of GPUs to find a key match. The exploit called "nRootTag" has a frightening success rate of 90% and doesn't require "sophisticated administrator privilege escalation." In one of the experiments, the researchers were able to track the location of a computer with an accuracy of 10 feet, which allowed them to trace a bicycle moving through the city. In another experiment, they reconstructed a person's flight path by tracking their game console. "While it is scary if your smart lock is hacked, it becomes far more horrifying if the attacker also knows its location. With the attack method we introduced, the attacker can achieve this," said one of the researchers. Apple has acknowledged the George Mason researchers for discovering a Bluetooth exploit in its Find My network but has yet to issue a fix. "For now, they advise users to never allow unnecessary access to the device's Bluetooth when requested by apps, and of course, always keep their device's software updated," reports 9to5Mac.

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Apple announced a new feature allowing parents to share a child's age with app developers without exposing sensitive information, as lawmakers debate age-verification laws for social media and apps. Reuters reports: States, such as Utah and South Carolina, are currently debating laws that would require app store operators such as Apple and Alphabet's Google to check the ages of users. That has set up a conflict in the tech industry over which party should be responsible for checking ages for users under 18 -- app stores, or each individual app. Meta, for instance, has long argued in favor of legislation requiring app stores to check ages when a child downloads an app. Apple on Thursday said it does not want to be responsible for collecting sensitive data for those age verifications. "While only a fraction of apps on the App Store may require age verification, all users would have to hand over their sensitive personally identifying information to us -- regardless of whether they actually want to use one of these limited set of apps," Apple wrote in a whitepaper on its website.

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Microsoft has released a native Copilot app for macOS, offering AI-powered text and image generation, dark mode, and a Command + Space shortcut. The Verge reports: Microsoft is launching this new Copilot Mac app in the US, UK, and Canada today, and the iPad version is also being updated with a split screen mode. You'll also now be able to log into Copilot on an iPhone or iPad with an Apple ID, and upload text or PDF files to ask questions about the documents or generate a summary about them. This document summarization feature is also coming to the macOS app soon. You can download the app here.

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