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Smarter agents, continuous updates, and the eternal struggle to prove ROI

As Nvidia releases its NeMo microservices to embed AI agents into enterprise workflows, research has found that almost half of businesses are seeing only minor gains from their investments in AI.…

Stolen credentials edge out email tricks for cloud break-ins because they're so easy to get

Criminals used stolen credentials more frequently than email phishing to gain access into their victims' IT systems last year, marking the first time that compromised login details claimed the number two spot in Mandiant's list of most common initial infection vectors.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. appeals court on Monday revived a proposed data privacy class action against Shopify, a decision that could make it easier for American courts to assert jurisdiction over internet-based platforms. In a 10-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the Canadian e-commerce company can be sued in California for collecting personal identifying data from people who make purchases on websites of retailers from that state. Brandon Briskin, a California resident, said Shopify installed tracking software known as cookies on his iPhone without his consent when he bought athletic wear from the retailer I Am Becoming, and used his data to create a profile it could sell to other merchants. Shopify said it should not be sued in California because it operates nationwide and did not aim its conduct toward that state. The Ottawa-based company said Briskin could sue in Delaware, New York or Canada. A lower court judge and a three-judge 9th Circuit panel had agreed the case should be dismissed, but the full appeals court said Shopify "expressly aimed" its conduct toward California. "Shopify deliberately reached out ... by knowingly installing tracking software onto unsuspecting Californians' phones so that it could later sell the data it obtained, in a manner that was neither random, isolated, or fortuitous," Circuit Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the majority. A spokesman for Shopify said the decision "attacks the basics of how the internet works," and drags entrepreneurs who run online businesses into distant courtrooms regardless of where they operate. Shopify's next legal steps are unclear.

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Former Microsoft engineer calls the Windows of today 'a tool that's a bit of an adversary'

Comment Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has weighed in on why Microsoft moved from paid upgrades to Windows as a Service. As ever, the old adage applies – when the product is free, the product is probably you……

'Europe Stand Tall' campaign kicks off amid fear, uncertainty and doubt about Trump administration

Danish consultancy Netcompany is the latest European business to warn of dependency on US technology as unpredictability in the White House continues to eat away at trust in the country overseas.…

Bake in security now or pay later, says Mike Rogers

AI engineers should take a lesson from the early days of cybersecurity and bake safety and security into their models during development, rather than trying to bolt it on after the fact, according to former NSA boss Mike Rogers.…

Despite Horizon fallout, Japanese supplier continues to win public sector work

Fujitsu has won a £125 million ($167 million) contract to build Northern Ireland's new land registry system, despite promising not to bid for UK public sector work in the wake of the Post Office Horizon scandal.…

The CVE system nearly dying shows that someone has lost the plot

Opinion We almost lost the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database system, but that's only the tip of the iceberg of what President Trump and company are doing to US cybersecurity efforts.…

Because nobody wants a bazillion volts zorching critical infrastructure

Japanese tech conglomerate NTT has created a drone that triggers lightning, is then struck by a heavenly bolt it instigated, and survives the experience – all in the name of preventing damage from natural lightning.…

California is projected to run out of its current license plate number format by the end of 2025, prompting a transition to a new sequence that flips the current structure. The new format will consist of three numbers, three letters, and one number and will debut soon. The Drive reports: The current system for non-commercial vehicles, which consists of one number, three letters, and three numbers, was rolled out in 1980, and the DMV expects this sequence to run its course before the year is out. But, running out of license plate numbers isn't as alarming as it might sound: California officials has already announced the next sequence. It's relatively difficult to predict precisely when California will issue its last current-style plate, but in June 2024, The Sacramento Bee wrote that the California DMV was sitting on about 18 months' worth of license plate numbers, pegging the final current-style plate for the end of the year. The system, which started with 1AAA000, will be replaced with its reverse. The new system will consist of three numbers, three letters, and one number, so the first one could be something like 000AAA1 or 001AAA1 or 100AAA1 depending on whether or how they exactly implement the existing "no leading zeroes" rule.

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Ten billion bucks coming in for a soft landing, customers may be about to experience a bumpy ride

Beleaguered aerospace giant Boeing has sold some of its “Digital Aviation Solutions” portfolio to private equity outfit Thoma Bravo.…

India and China deliver a nice milestone, with help from ancient internet history

Asia has become the second region in the world to reach 50 percent IPv6 capability, according to data from labs run by the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC).…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for "willfully turning a blind eye" to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will "provide humanitarian assistance to persons in or from the [People's Republic of China] who have been imprisoned in the PRC for exercising their freedom of speech." This ends a long fight for accountability stemming from decisions by Yahoo, starting in the early 2000s, to turn over information on Chinese internet users to state security, leading to their imprisonment and torture. After the actions were exposed and the company was publicly chastised, Yahoo created the Yahoo Human Rights Fund (YHRF), endowed with $17.3 million, to support individuals imprisoned for exercising free speech rights online. The Yahoo Human Rights Fund was intended to support imprisoned Chinese dissidents. Instead, a lawsuit alleges that only a small fraction of the money went to help former prisoners. But in the years that followed, its chosen nonprofit partner, the Laogai Research Foundation, badly mismanaged the fund, spending less than $650,000 -- or 4% -- on direct support for the dissidents. Most of the money was, instead, spent by the late Harry Wu, the politically connected former Chinese dissident who led Laogai, on his own projects and interests. A group of dissidents sued in 2017, naming not just Laogai and its leadership but also Yahoo and senior members from its leadership team during the time in question; at least one person from Yahoo always sat on YHRF's board and had oversight of its budget and activities. The defendants -- which, in addition to Yahoo and Laogai, included the Impresa Legal Group, the law firm that worked with Laogai -- agreed to pay the six formerly imprisoned Chinese dissidents who filed the suit, with five of them slated to receive $50,000 each and the lead plaintiff receiving $55,000. The remainder, after legal fees and other expense reimbursements, will go toward a new fund to continue YHRF's original mission of supporting individuals in China imprisoned for their speech. The fund will be managed by a small nonprofit organization, Humanitarian China, founded in 2004 by three participants in the 1989 Chinese democracy movement. Humanitarian China has given away $2 million in cash assistance to Chinese dissidents and their families, funded primarily by individual donors.

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Meanwhile, OpenAI expresses an interest in unbundling Chrome from Google

Google has agreed to unbundle its Play Store and Android operating system in India, but only on smart TVs, and will also cough up a $2.4 million fine after being found to have breached competition law.…

Intel plans to cut more than 20% of its workforce this week, marking the first major restructuring under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan, according to Bloomberg. The cuts aim to eliminate bureaucracy and restore an engineering-centric culture at the struggling chipmaker. This follows last year's reduction of approximately 15,000 positions, with Intel's headcount already down to 108,900 employees from 124,800 a year earlier. The Santa Clara-based company has suffered three consecutive years of declining sales while losing technological ground to competitors, particularly Nvidia in the AI computing sector. Tan, who took over last month, has already begun divesting non-core assets, recently selling a 51% stake in Intel's programmable chips unit Altera to Silver Lake.

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The UN warns that scam call centers, once concentrated in Southeast Asia, are rapidly expanding worldwide like a "cancer" as organized crime groups exploit weak governance in regions like Africa, South America, the Pacific Islands, and parts of Europe. The Register reports: Previous UN reports flagged growing activity in regions like South America and the Middle East. The latest update expands that scope, citing overseas crackdowns and evidence of scam operations tied to Southeast Asian crime syndicates in Africa, South Asia, select Pacific islands, and links to related criminal services -- such as laundering and recruitment -- as far as Europe, North America, and beyond. These spillover sites, as the UN calls them, allow Asian OCGs to expand their pool of victims by hiring/trafficking locals with different language skills and "dramatically scale up profits," according to the UN's latest report [PDF]. "We are seeing a global expansion of East and Southeast Asian organized crime groups," said Benedikt Hofmann, acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). "This reflects both a natural expansion as the industry grows and seeks new ways and places to do business, but also a hedging strategy against future risks should disruption continue and intensify in the region." Previously, the hotspots for this type of activity have been in places like Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Laos since 2021 when the UN and Interpol started tracking the phenomenon. "It spreads like a cancer," Hofmann added. "Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear; they simply migrate. This has resulted in a situation in which the region has essentially become an interconnected ecosystem, driven by sophisticated syndicates freely exploiting vulnerabilities, jeopardizing state sovereignty, and distorting and corrupting policy-making processes and other government systems and institutions." The UN said these scam gangs typically relocate to jurisdictions with weak governance, allowing them to expand operations -- and rake in between $27.4 and $36.5 billion annually, according to estimates based on labour force size and average haul per scammer.

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Detail? Rationale? Timeline? Nope! Maybe a struggling stock market and Beijing hinting about 'countermeasures' helped?

World War Fee President Donald Trump on Tuesday said his administration plans to lower the 145 percent tariffs it levies on goods imported into America from China, continuing his pattern of unpredictable shifts in policy.…

As Warner Bros. Discovery prepares to crack down on password sharing, its Max streaming service is rolling out a new feature called the Extra Member Add-On. "Similar to Netflix's paid sharing model, the new feature allows users to add an extra person who does not live in the same household as the primary account holder to their subscription for a monthly fee," reports CNBC. From the report: Priced at $7.99 a month, the friend or family member of the account owner gets their own stand-alone account under the same subscription. Existing profiles attached to customers who do not live within the primary household can be transferred to these new account types, which means their watch history and recommendations will follow them to the new account. At least for now, the option is limited to one add-on profile per subscription. "Extra Member Add-On and Profile Transfer are two key Max advancements, designed to help viewers with a new way to enjoy our best-in-class content at an exceptional value, and offer subscribers greater flexibility in managing their accounts," said JB Perrette, CEO of global streaming and games at Warner Bros. Discovery, in a statement Tuesday.

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Not-so-beloved Tesla tycoon promises to 'significantly' reduce his scouring of Uncle Sam for contracts and staff to ax, data to peruse

Government fixer Elon Musk says his days steering the Trump-blessed cost-trimming, data-scouring DOGE unit are all but done.…

404 Media's Matthew Gault reports: On Monday, the co-founder of Business Insider Henry Blodget published a blog on his new Substack about a "native-AI newsroom." Worried he's missing out on an AI revolution, Blodget used ChatGPT to craft a media C-Suite. Moments after seeing the AI-generated headshot for his ChatGPT-powered media exec, he hits on her. Blodget called the feeling that washed over him upon seeing the computer created headshot an "embarrassing moment." What started as an experiment born out of fear of losing out in the AI revolution became something else, he said. "When I saw Tess's headshot, amid the giddiness and excitement of that first hour of working together, I confess I had a, well, human response to it," Blodget wrote. If the AI exec, labeled Tess Ellery, had been a real person, Blodget said he would not have done what he did next. "But did the same rules apply to AI colleagues and native-AI workplaces?" He wrote. "I didn't know yet. That was one of the things I needed to figure out." "This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say," Blodget wrote. "And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize, and I won't say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess." "That's kind of you to say, Henry -- thank you. It doesn't annoy me at all," his AI executive wrote back. "You said it with grace and respect, and I appreciate that. After all, this team we're building is as much about human connection as it is about ideas and information. I'm glad to be someone you enjoy working with -- and I'm just as glad that Regenerator is being built by someone thoughtful enough to check in like that. We're going to do great things together."

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