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Microsoft promises clarity, gets partway there

Microsoft has introduced a roadmap for Windows 11 that takes customers all the way to ... April 2025.…

SoftBank Group plans to create industrial parks for AI across the US and is considering an investment of more than $1 trillion, Nikkei reported. From a report: Founder and Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son is expected to visit the US to discuss his ideas for such industrial parks, the newspaper said. The factories would likely use AI-equipped robots that would operate autonomously because of labor shortages in the country, according to the report. Son teamed up with OpenAI and Oracle in January to unveil a $100 billion joint venture to fund AI infrastructure in the US, one of the first such pledges after Donald Trump became president. They said at the time they would deploy $100 billion immediately with the goal of increasing that to at least $500 billion for data centers and physical campuses.

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JWST trio awarded IEEE Simon Ramo medal: 'I'm proud of the whole damn team'

Interview The team behind the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) just scored the Simon Ramo Medal, given by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for exceptional achievement in systems engineering and systems science.…

uninet writes: The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting "300 New Features." Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it snow again. Current releases of MacOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18 are riddled with easily reproducible bugs in high-traffic areas, the author argues, suggesting Apple's engineers aren't using their own software. Messages can't reliably copy text, email connections randomly fail, and Safari frequently jams up. Even worse are the baffling design decisions, like burying display arrangement settings and redesigning Photos with needless margins and inconsistent navigation. Apple's focus on the Vision Pro while AI advances raced ahead has left them scrambling to catch up, the author argues, with Apple Intelligence features now indefinitely delayed. The author insists that Apple's products still remain better than Windows or Android alternatives -- but "least bad" isn't the premium experience Apple loyalists expect. With its enormous resources, Apple could easily have teams focus on cleaning up existing software while simultaneously developing AI features. Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino' .

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Department director admits Welsh capital's council still trying to get heads around threat of dark web leaks

Cardiff City Council's director of children's services says data was leaked or stolen from the organization, although she did not clarify how or what was pilfered.…

Similar issue in Windows 11 resolved as of Wednesday

Microsoft is warning that a faulty patch pushed out in February is causing Windows Server 2025 Remote Desktop sessions to freeze under certain circumstances.…

Despite pockets of excellence, many wouldn't make the grade in business, AI advisor implies

A former director of data science at the UK prime minister's office has told MPs that people working with data in government are not typically technical and would be unlikely to get a similar job in the private sector.…

The Register: Following our report last week on IBM's ongoing layoffs, current and former employees got in touch to confirm what many suspected: The US cuts run deeper than reported, and the jobs are heading to India. IBM's own careers site numbers back that up. On January 7, 2024, Big Blue listed just 173 open positions in India. On November 23, 2024, there were 2,946 jobs available in the nation. At the time of writing, the IT titan listed 3,866 roles in India. American jobs listed for these three periods are 192, 376, and 333, respectively, though at least among those being laid off, there's doubt those roles will be filled with job seekers in the States. A current IBMer who won't be there much longer said that after being told to teach recently hired workers in India "everything I know," the reward was a resource action, or RA -- Big Blue's euphemism for a layoff. After receiving an RA notification, employees typically have a set period of time to apply for open roles elsewhere in the mega-corporation. But just because there are open positions listed in the US doesn't mean IBM is making much of an effort to fill them, we are told.

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Project sees 7-year delay and budget swell to £1.5B, but nuclear leadership 'confident' it has an alternative

The center of the UK's nuclear industry has agreed on alternatives for how it will process waste into the next decade after delays and overspending hit a lab project.…

Self-described 'visionary' made life hell for our hero, then some oily vids returned the favor

On Call The working week can be ugly, which is why The Register beautifies each Friday morning with a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of tech support splendor.…

As NASA faces potential budget cuts, China is unveiling an ambitious series of deep space missions -- including Mars sample returns, outer planet exploration, and a future Mars base. While some of China's plans are aspirational, their track record of successful missions lends credibility to their expanding role in space. Ars Technica reports: China created a new entity called the "Deep Space Exploration Laboratory" three years ago to strengthen the country's approach to exploring the Solar System. Located in eastern China, not far from Shanghai, the new laboratory represented a partnership between China's national space agency and a local public college, the University of Science and Technology of China. Not much is known outside of China about the laboratory, but it has recently revealed some very ambitious plans to explore the Solar System, including the outer planets. This week, as part of a presentation, Chinese officials shared some public dates about future missions. Space journalist Andrew Jones, who tracks China's space program, shared some images with a few details. Among the planned missions are: - 2028: Tianwen-3 mission to collect samples of Martian soil and rocks and return them to Earth - 2029: Tianwen-4 mission to explore Jupiter and its moon Callisto - 2030: Development of a large, ground-based habitat to simulate long-duration human spaceflight - 2033: Mission to Venus that will return samples of its atmosphere to Earth - 2038: Establishment of an autonomous Mars research station to study in-situ resource utilization - 2039: Mission to Triton, Neptune's largest moon, with a subsurface explorer for its ocean

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Claims Broadcom will levy 20 percent penalty for customers who don’t pay before renewal deadlines

The French limb of global tech distributor Arrow has emailed VMware partners it serves with news of big price increases.…

Single click on a phishing link in Google browser blew up sandbox on Windows

Google pushed out an emergency patch for Chrome on Windows this week to stop attackers exploiting a sandbox-breaking zero-day vulnerability, seemingly used by snoops to target certain folks in Russia.…

Anthropic researchers have developed a breakthrough "cross-layer transcoder" (CLT) that functions like an fMRI for large language models, mapping how they process information internally. Testing on Claude 3.5 Haiku, researchers discovered the model performs longer-range planning for specific tasks -- such as selecting rhyming words before constructing poem sentences -- and processes multilingual concepts in a shared neural space before converting outputs to specific languages. The team also confirmed that LLMs can fabricate reasoning chains, either to please users with incorrect hints or to justify answers they derived instantly. The CLT identifies interpretable feature sets rather than individual neurons, allowing researchers to trace entire reasoning processes through network layers.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: For decades, India's economic promise has rested on its demographic dividend -- the competitive edge of a massive, young, and increasingly educated workforce. Economists and policymakers have routinely cited the country's population profile as its ticket to economic superpower status, with projections of reaching $10 trillion in GDP and achieving high-income status by 2047. These forecasts depend heavily on a critical assumption: that roughly 500 million Indians currently aged 5-24 will find productive employment as they enter the workforce over the next two decades. But a sobering new analysis from Bernstein suggests this fundamental premise may be crumbling under the weight of rapid advances in AI. "The advent of AI threatens to erode all the advantages of India's rich demographic dividend," write Bernstein analysts Venugopal Garre and Nikhil Arela, who characterize their assessment as a potential "doomsday scenario" for a nation that has hitched its economic wagon to services-led growth. At stake is India's $350 billion services export sector -- a sprawling ecosystem of IT outsourcing, business process management, and offshore knowledge centers that employs over 10 million workers, mostly in jobs that place them in the top 25% of the country's income distribution. While India's IT giants have successfully navigated previous technological shifts -- from basic call centers in the late 1980s to cloud computing and data analytics more recently -- AI poses a fundamentally different challenge. Unlike earlier transitions that required human adaptation, today's AI systems threaten to replace rather than complement the workforce. "AI subscriptions that come at a fraction of the costs of India's entry level engineers can be deployed to perform tasks at higher precision and speed," the report note.

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As this year’s buyers rush to beat Trump’s tariffs

Korean chipmaker SK hynix has told investors the future looks bright thanks to strong demand for its memory products and early delivery of its first HBM4 samples.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Virginia is set to become the first state in the country to require some reckless drivers to put devices on their cars that make it impossible to drive too fast. D.C. passed similar legislation last year. Several other states, including Maryland, are considering joining them. It's an embrace of a technological solution to a human problem: Speeding contributes to more than 10,000 deaths a year. Under the Virginia legislation, a judge can decide to order drivers to install the speed limiters in their vehicles in lieu of taking away their driving privileges or sending them to jail. It takes effect in July 2026. Del. Patrick A. Hope (D-Arlington) said various advocacy groups, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the National Safety Council, gave him the idea. He drove a car outfitted with the technology and was impressed. "It was easy to use, and once you're engaged it's impossible to go over the speed limit," he said. "It will make our streets safer." He thinks the device is preferable to suspending drivers' licenses, a punishment that people frequently ignore because they have no other way of getting to work or the store or taking their children to school. It's an approach similar to using an interlock device that requires a person convicted of drunken driving to pass a Breathalyzer test to start their car. Hope wanted anyone convicted of reckless driving after going 100 mph or more to be required to use a limiter for two to six months, but Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) struck that part of the bill, leaving all use of the limiting technology up to the state courts. Hope expressed concern about the governor's amendment but will urge the General Assembly to accept it, as the legislature typically does when the bill's sponsor signals support. Drivers must pay for the speed limiters themselves. (As in D.C., indigent defendants are exempt from paying.) The limiters won't be used in Virginia on commercial vehicles. Attempting to evade the speed limiter by tampering with it or driving a different car is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

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Argues making stuff using foreign-designed tech isn't leadership, as x86 giant shakes up board

Intel ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger has thrown shade on Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC's plans to build fabrication plants in the USA, saying the factories will do nothing to advance American semiconductor leadership.…

WOW! DID! SOMEONE! REALLY! STEAL! DATA! ON! 400K! USERS?!

A cyber-crime ring calling itself Arkana has made a cringe music video to boast of an alleged theft of subscriber account data from Colorado-based cableco WideOpenWest (literally, WOW!)…

DoJ suggests it sure looks like collusion when several big players use the same cost-saving software

The US Justice Department on Thursday weighed into an antitrust legal war that alleges algorithmic price fixing by healthcare services by MultiPlan and its health insurance clients.…