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Dismissal bid denied as 16-count indictment moves toward trial in May 2026

Huawei will still have to face trial in the US next year over alleged breaches of sanctions against Iran after a judge declined its request to dismiss various charges.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2021, Google set a lofty goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Yet in the years since then, the company has moved in the opposite direction as it invests in energy-intensive artificial intelligence. In its latest sustainability report, Google said its carbon emissions had increased 51% between 2019 and 2024. New research aims to debunk even that enormous figure and provide context to Google's sustainability reports, painting a bleaker picture. A report authored by non-profit advocacy group Kairos Fellowship found that, between 2019 and 2024, Google's carbon emissions actually went up by 65%. What's more, between 2010, the first year there is publicly available data on Google's emissions, and 2024, Google's total greenhouse gas emissions increased 1,515%, Kairos found. The largest year-over-year jump in that window was also the most recent, 2023 to 2024, when Google saw a 26% increase in emissions just between 2023 and 2024, according to the report.

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Reports of 9,000 staff cut

Microsoft's recent trend of wide-scale workforce reduction continues, with reports that Redmond is preparing to slash an additional 4 percent of its employees – or around 9,000 people.…

Datacenters kept humming along, but there's plenty of blame to be passed around elsewhere

The cause of a power outage that cut the juice to London Heathrow airport in March has been identified - along with a chain of failures that allowed it to happen.…

Earth's atmosphere now has more carbon dioxide in it than it has in millions -- and possibly tens of millions -- of years, according to data released last month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the University of California San Diego. From a report: For the first time, global average concentrations of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, exceeded 430 parts per million (ppm) in May. The new readings were a record high and represented an increase of more than 3 ppm over last year. The measurements indicate that countries are not doing enough to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the steady buildup of C02, which climate scientists point to as the main culprit for global warming. "Another year, another record," Ralph Keeling, a professor of climate sciences, marine chemistry and geochemistry at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement. "It's sad."

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The UK government is preparing new legislation to address undersea cable sabotage as current laws are proving inadequate for modern threats. Ministry of Defence parliamentary under-secretary Luke Pollard told lawmakers yesterday that the Submarine Telegraph Act of 1885, which imposes 1,000 pound ($1,370) fines, "does seem somewhat out of step with the modern-day risk." The government's Strategic Defence Review proposes a new defence readiness bill to cover state-sponsored cybercrime and subsea cable attacks. Chris Bryant, minister of state for data protection and telecoms, said fines could be increased to 5,000 pound ($6,850) through secondary legislation but "that just doesn't seem to meet the needs of the situation." Recent incidents include Sweden's deployment of forces to the Baltic Sea following suspected Russian attacks on underwater data cables in January. The China Strategic Risks Institute found that eight of ten identified vessels in 12 sabotage incidents between January 2021 and April 2025 were linked to China or Russia through registration or ownership.

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NASA science might be cut, but cash can be found to move a 'space vehicle' from museum to museum

Lurking in the text contained within the One Big Beautiful Bill, which was passed by the US Senate yesterday, is an $85 million allocation for shifting a "space vehicle" to a new location, widely interpreted as a move of the retired Space Shuttle Discovery orbiter from Virginia to Houston.…

Microsoft is kicking off its fiscal year by firing thousands of employees in the largest round of layoffs since 2023, the company confirmed Wednesday. From a report: In an ongoing effort to streamline its workforce, Microsoft said that as much as 4%, or roughly 9,100, of the company's employees could be affected by Wednesday's layoffs. The move follows two waves of layoffs in May and June, which saw Microsoft fire more than 6,000 employees, almost 2,300 of whom were based in Washington.

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Cutting out middle man dents coffers of larger service providers, helps Redmond offset AI investments

The sweeping changes Microsoft is making to its licensing incentives for large service providers is taking hold.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GameSpot: Perhaps responding to economic uncertainty and narrowing job prospects, young people in the United States are significantly cutting back on spending on video games compared to this time last year. While 18- to 24-year-olds aren't buying as much across a range of different categories, losses are concentrated in games. New data published by market research firm Circana and reported by The Wall Street Journal suggests that young adults spent nearly 25% less on video game products in a four-week span in April than in the same timeframe last year. Other categories also dramatic drops: Accessories (down 18%), technology (down 14%), and furniture (down 12%). All categories combined, the 18-24 age group spent around 13% less than last year. This decrease is not reflected among older cohorts, whose spending has been mostly stable year-over-year. The WSJ report suggests that the economic context could be driving young adults to pull back; a tighter labor market, increased economic uncertainty, and student-loan payments restarting all may be contributing to an environment hostile to the spending habits of 18- to 24-year-olds in particular.

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Aeza Group accused of assisting data bandits and BianLian ransomware crooks

The US Treasury has sanctioned Aeza Group, a Russian bulletproof hosting (BPH) provider, and four of its cronies for enabling ransomware and other cybercriminal activity.…

Are you sure you wouldn't rather run in our cloud?

Microsoft has made Subscription Editions (SE) of Exchange Server and Skype for Business Server generally available, marking an end to year-numbered versions.…

Open source initiative aims to offer enterprise security feature without vendor lock-in

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) is a popular approach to encrypting data at the storage layer, beefing up database security. While PostgreSQL has steadily climbed in popularity – especially among professional developers – it has so far lacked this enterprise feature, at least in open source.…

China's Northwestern Polytechnical University successfully tested a hypersonic aircraft called Feitian-2, claiming it reached Mach 12 and achieved a world-first by autonomously switching between rocket and ramjet propulsion mid-flight. The Register reports: The University named the craft "Feitian-2" and according to Chinese media the test flight saw it reach Mach 12 (14,800 km/h or 9,200 mph) -- handily faster than the Mach 5 speeds considered to represent hypersonic flight. Chinese media have not detailed the size of Feitian-2, or its capabilities other than to repeat the University's claim that it combined a rocket and a ramjet into a single unit. [...] The University and Chinese media claim the Feitian-2 flew autonomously while changing from rocket to ramjet while handling the hellish stresses that come with high speed flight. This test matters because, as the US Congressional Budget Office found in 2023, hypothetical hypersonic missiles "have the potential to create uncertainty about what their ultimate target is. Their low flight profile puts them below the horizon for long-range radar and makes them difficult to track, and their ability to maneuver while gliding makes their path unpredictable." "Hypersonic weapons can also maneuver unpredictably at high speeds to counter short-range defenses near a target, making it harder to track and intercept them," the Office found. Washington is so worried about Beijing developing hypersonic weapons that the Trump administration cited the possibility as one reason for banning another 27 Chinese organizations from doing business with US suppliers of AI and advanced computing tech. The flight of Feitian-2 was therefore a further demonstration of China's ability to develop advanced technologies despite US bans.

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Experts say they don't expect the MOVEit menace to do much about it

Security experts have uncovered a hole in Cl0p's data exfiltration tool that could potentially leave the cybercrime group vulnerable to attack.…

It might be time to update the Submarine Telegraph Act of 1885

Cyberattacks and undersea cable sabotage are blurring the line between war and peace and exposing holes in UK law, a government minister has warned lawmakers.…

Mysterious ‘Alloy 30’ gets smaller when heated, which could help stabilize super-sensitive space telescopes

NASA is exploring the properties of a metal alloy that shrinks as it is heated, as boffins in its Astrophysics Division think it may be needed if the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory (HBO) is to succeed.…

MethaneSAT, an $88 million satellite backed by Jeff Bezos and led by the Environmental Defense Fund to track global methane emissions, has been lost in space after going off course and losing power over Norway. "We're seeing this as a setback, not a failure," Amy Middleton, senior vice president at EDF, told Reuters. "We've made so much progress and so much has been learned that if we hadn't taken this risk, we wouldn't have any of these learnings." Reuters reports: The launch of MethaneSAT in March 2024 was a milestone in a years-long campaign by EDF to hold accountable the more than 120 countries that in 2021 pledged to curb their methane emissions. It also sought to help enforce a further promise from 50 oil and gas companies made at the Dubai COP28 climate summit in December 2023 to eliminate methane and routine gas flaring. [...] While MethaneSAT was not the only project to publish satellite data on methane emissions, its backers said it provided more detail on emissions sources and it partnered with Google to create a publicly-available global map of emissions. EDF reported the lost satellite to federal agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Space Force on Tuesday, it said. Building and launching the satellite cost $88 million, according to the EDF. The organization had received a $100 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020 and got other major financial support from Arnold Ventures, the Robertson Foundation and the TED Audacious Project and EDF donors. The project was also partnered with the New Zealand Space Agency. EDF said it had insurance to cover the loss and its engineers were investigating what had happened. The organization said it would continue to use its resources, including aircraft with methane-detecting spectrometers, to look for methane leaks. It also said it was too early to say whether it would seek to launch another satellite but believed MethaneSAT proved that a highly sensitive instrument "could see total methane emissions, even at low levels, over wide areas."

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And no, that's not a typo

Amazon Web Services has cooked up a new Graviton 4-powered instance tuned for network-intensive applications like cloud firewalls and load balancers.…

It's 2025 so even this networking deal is about AI, which is apparently about to change wide area networks

Broadcom has sold VeloCloud, the software-defined WAN business VMware acquired in 2017, to Arista.…