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Federal authorities have broken up an international crime ring that stole thousands of iPhones from porches nationwide [non-paywalled link], arresting 13 people last month after a sophisticated operation that combined high-tech tools with old-fashioned bribery. The thieves created software to scrape FedEx tracking numbers and paid AT&T store employees to provide customer order details and delivery addresses, according to WSJ, which cites prosecutors. Armed with this information, runners intercepted packages at doorsteps moments after delivery. Demetrio Reyes Martinez, known online as "CookieNerd," developed code that circumvented FedEx limits on delivery-data requests, while AT&T employee Alejandro Then Castillo used his credentials to track hundreds of shipments and reportedly received up to $2,500 for recruiting other employees. Stolen devices were funneled through Wyckoff Wireless in Brooklyn, a store owned by Joel Suriel, who was already on supervised release from a previous wire-fraud conviction. The merchandise was then shipped overseas for sale and activation.

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Tech channel increases stockpiling amid 'volatile trade policies.' CIOs to get fewer devices for same money

Comment US President Donald Trump's "volatile trade policies" are creating uncertainty among suppliers of computers and among biz customers looking to use budgets wisely amid a game of on-and-off Oval Office tariffs.…

Nature: A Microsoft researcher [this week] presented results behind the company's controversial claim last month to have created the first 'topological' qubits -- a long-sought goal of quantum computing. In front of a packed room at a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), Chetan Nayak, a theoretical physicist leading Microsoft's quantum computing effort in Redmond, Washington, explained how the company is developing topological qubits, which would be the building blocks for a noise-resistant quantum computer. Physicists in the audience told Nature's news team they are still unsure whether Microsoft really has made the first topological qubits, however. "It's a hard problem," says Ali Yazdani, an experimental physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey. To anyone trying to make topological qubits, he says, "good luck." When Nayak displayed measurement data during his presentation, he acknowledged that a characteristic signal was difficult to see due to electrical noise, prompting Cornell University theorist Eun-Ah Kim to question its robustness. Microsoft says additional details will be available in a forthcoming paper on the arXiv preprint server. Further reading: Scientists Question Microsoft's Quantum Computing Claims; Microsoft Quantum Computing 'Breakthrough' Faces Fresh Challenge

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Dev behind the GNU-free distro says boards too slow for serious work

The creators of the unique Chimera Linux distro are dropping support for RISC-V because kit built on the open instruction set architecture just isn't fast enough and this is holding up the development pipeline.…

Sony has developed a new TV display technology combining individual red, green, and blue LEDs for backlighting, potentially offering a middle ground between existing Mini LED and OLED panels. Dubbed "General RGB LED Backlight Technology," the system enables precise color control without sacrificing brightness, reaching 4000 cd/m2 -- matching Sony's professional reference monitors. Unlike conventional Mini LED TVs that use arrays of blue LEDs, Sony's RGB implementation delivers significantly improved color accuracy and viewing angles. In side-by-side comparisons with Sony's premium Bravia 9 Mini LED TV, the RGB prototype displayed deeper color gradations and eliminated the characteristic bluish blooming effect around bright objects on dark backgrounds. The technology isn't entirely novel, the Verge reports -- Sony released a Qualia TV with RGB backlighting in 2004 and demonstrated "Crystal LED" prototypes in 2012. Competitors including Hisense, TCL, and Samsung are developing similar systems. While the RGB LED prototype outshone Sony's QD-OLED A95L in brightness, differences in color reproduction were less pronounced. The technology appears particularly promising for larger displays in bright environments where OLED's limitations become apparent.

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Elements within the US space agency have elected to toe the party line

Comment The Crew-9 mission has safely returned to Earth, marking the end of Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore's extended time in space and possibly NASA's bipartisan leanings.…

Cue deepening existential European dread as Rest of World contemplates Trump turning off the info tap

If the United States stopped sharing cyber-threat intel with Ukraine, its European allies and the rest of the Five Eyes nations wouldn't be able to provide all the info Uncle Sam collects, according to former chief of US Cyber Command and the NSA General Paul Nakasone.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Belgian prosecutor's office said on Tuesday that it has charged five people in connection with a bribery investigation in the European Parliament allegedly linked to China's Huawei. The five were detained last week. Four have now been arrested and charged with active corruption and involvement in a criminal organization, while a fifth faces money laundering charges and has been released conditionally. The prosecutor's officer did not disclose the names of those involved or give information that could identify them. It said new searches had taken place on Monday, this time at European Parliament offices. Huawei said last week it took the allegations seriously. "Huawei has a zero tolerance policy towards corruption or other wrongdoing, and we are committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations at all times," it said. The prosecutors have said the alleged corruption took place "very discreetly" since 2021 under the guise of commercial lobbying and involved payments for taking certain political stances or excessive gifts such as food and travel expenses or regular invitations to football matches.

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Supply chain and tariffs issues could spell trouble across multiple markets, warns JLL

Analysis ​Despite ongoing construction efforts, the North American colocation datacenter market is grappling with record-high occupancy rates. This surge in demand, coupled with delays in new projects due to electricity shortages, has created a challenging environment for both developers and customers.…

Services still down and out, but techies working for local government saved the day

Nottingham City Council continues to deal with the fallout from its freak IT outage from last week as it confirms in-house IT specialists managed to prevent any data from going missing.…

Because guesswork won't keep the lights on

GTC Schneider Electric has developed a digital twin system to simulate how an AI datacenter operates in order to accurately design for the appropriate power requirements.…

It's easier to replace bits of userland than the kernel

Efforts are afoot to replace the GNU coreutils with Rust ones in the version after next of Ubuntu, 25.10 – which also means changing the software license.…

The abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: Ensuring broad access to the patent system is crucial for fostering innovation and promoting economic growth. To support this goal, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office offers reduced fees for small and micro entities. This paper investigates whether fee rates affect the filing of applications by small and micro entities. Exploiting recent fee reforms, the study evaluates the relationship between fee changes and the number of new entrants, controlling for potential confounding factors such as legislative changes. The findings suggest that fee reductions alone are insufficient to significantly increase participation in the patent system among small and micro entities.

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'Three-year' tech support deal still running

The UK's third-largest grocery retailer is set to finish its "three-year" tech divorce project from Walmart in the third quarter of 2025, while most project staff have been moved on.…

One more time, with feeling ... Garbage in, garbage out, in training and inference

Researchers have found that large language models (LLMs) tend to parrot buggy code when tasked with completing flawed snippets.…

If this light-activated stuff works, it could make building robots easier - or make lazing about under the Sun quite a workout

Bioengineers have pulled together to get artificial muscles pulling in multiple directions, an important step towards using them in medical treatments and robots.…

During the company's GTC 2025 keynote today, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced Isaac GR00T N1 -- the company's first open-source, pre-trained yet customizable foundation model designed to accelerate the development and capabilities of humanoid robots. "The age of generalist robotics is here," said Huang. "With Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI." The Verge reports: Huang demonstrated 1X's NEO Gamma humanoid robot performing autonomous tidying jobs using a post-trained policy built on the GR00T N1 model. [...] Other companies developing humanoid robots who have had early access to the GR00T N1 model include Boston Dynamics, the creators of Atlas; Agility Robotics; Mentee Robotics; and Neura Robotics. Originally announced as Project GR00T a year ago, the GR00T N1 foundation model utilizes a dual-system architecture inspired by human cognition. System 1, as Nvidia calls it, is described as a "fast-thinking action model" that behaves similarly to human reflexes and intuition. It was trained on data collected through human demonstrations and synthetic data generated by Nvidia's Omniverse platform. System 2, which is powered by a vision language model, is a "slow-thinking model" that "reasons about its environment and the instructions it has received to plan actions." Those plans are passed along to System 1, which translates them into "precise, continuous robot movements" that include grasping, moving objects with one or two arms, as well as more complex multistep tasks that involve combinations of basic skills. While the GR00T N1 foundation model is pretrained with generalized humanoid reasoning and skills, developers can customize its behavior and capabilities for specific needs by post-training it with data gathered from human demonstrations or simulations. Nvidia has made GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios available for download through Hugging Face and GitHub.

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Analyst finds 91 percent revenue growth with white box makers leading the way

Here’s another thing AI can do: Increase revenue from selling servers by 91 percent year-over year, according to analyst firm IDC.…

Apparently boosts battery to 20 km range in 10 seconds, although as ever ... YMMV

Chinese electric automaker BYD has announced 1,000-volt supercharging technology it claims can fill a compatible vehicle’s battery in the same amount of time needed to pump fuel into a conventional car.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [A] team of Korean researchers [describe] how they've engineered a bacterial strain that can make a useful polymer starting with nothing but glucose as fuel. The system they developed is based on an enzyme that the bacteria use when they're facing unusual nutritional conditions, and it can be tweaked to make a wide range of polymers. The researchers focused on the system bacterial cells use for producing polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). These chemicals are formed when the bacterial cells continue to have a good supply of carbon sources and energy, but they lack some other key nutrients needed to grow and divide. Under these circumstances, the cell will link together small molecules that contain a handful of carbons, forming a much larger polymer. When nutritional conditions improve, the cell can simply break down the polymer and use the individual molecules it contained. The striking thing about this system is that it's not especially picky about the identity of the molecules it links into the polymer. So far, over 150 different small molecules have been found incorporated into PHAs. It appears that the enzyme that makes the polymer, PHA synthase, only cares about two things: whether the molecule can form an ester bond (PHAs are polyesters), and whether it can be linked to a molecule that's commonly used as an intermediate in the cell's biochemistry, Coenzyme A. Normally, PHA synthase forms links between molecules that run through an oxygen atom. But it's also possible to form a related chemical link that instead runs through a nitrogen atom, like those found on amino acids. There were no known enzymes, however, that catalyze these reactions. So, the researchers decided to test whether any existing enzymes could be induced to do something they don't normally do. [...] Overall, the system they develop is remarkably flexible, able to incorporate a huge range of chemicals into a polymer. This should allow them to tune the resulting plastic across a wide range of properties. And, considering the bonds were formed via enzyme, the resulting polymer will almost certainly be biodegradable. There are, however, some negatives. The process doesn't allow complete control over what gets incorporated into the polymer. You can bias it toward a specific mix of amino acids or other chemicals, but you can't entirely stop the enzyme from incorporating random chemicals from the cell's metabolism into the polymer at some level. There's also the issue of purifying the polymer from all the rest of the cell components before incorporating it into manufacturing. Production is also relatively slow compared to large-scale industrial production. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

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