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Nearly one in four U.S. tech jobs posted in 2025 require AI skills, according to data from the University of Maryland's AI job tracker, as companies across sectors adapt to the technology. Companies across healthcare, retail and utilities are increasingly seeking candidates who can integrate AI into existing roles rather than creating entirely new positions, with these skills commanding premium pay and greater job security. The information sector leads with 36% of IT jobs in January seeking AI expertise, followed by finance and professional services firms. AI-related listings account for 1.3% of all job postings nationwide. New AI job postings surged 68% since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 through end-2024, while tech postings overall fell 27% during the same period.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: AI excels at following instructions -- but it's not pushing the boundaries of knowledge, says Thomas Wolf. The chief science officer and cofounder of Hugging Face, an open-source AI company backed by Amazon and Nvidia, analyzed the limits of large language models. He wrote that the field produces "overly compliant helpers" rather than revolutionaries. Right now, AI isn't creating new knowledge, Wolf wrote. Instead, it's just filling in the blanks between existing facts -- what he called "manifold filling." Wolf argues that for AI to drive real scientific breakthroughs, it needs to do more than retrieve and synthesize information. AI should question its own training data, take counterintuitive approaches, generate new ideas from minimal input, and ask unexpected questions that open new research paths. Wolf also weighed in on the idea of a "compressed 21st century" -- a concept from an October essay by Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, "Machine of Loving Grace." Amodei wrote that AI could accelerate scientific progress so much that discoveries expected over the next 100 years could happen in just five to 10. "I read this essay twice. The first time I was totally amazed: AI will change everything in science in five years, I thought!" Wolf wrote on X. "Re-reading it, I realized that much of it seemed like wishful thinking at best." Unless AI research shifts gears, Wolf warned, we won't get a new Albert Einstein in a data center -- just a future filled with "yes-men on servers."

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Terabytes of sensitive info remain available for download

Break-ins to systems hosting the data of two US healthcare organizations led to thieves making off with the personal and medical data of more than 300,000 patients.…

Study finds 4 out of 6 providers don't do enough to stop impersonation

Four out of six companies offering AI voice cloning software fail to provide meaningful safeguards against the misuse of their products, according to research conducted by Consumer Reports.…

Experts say that the way you handle things after the criminals break in can make things better or much, much worse

Feature Experiencing a ransomware infection or other security breach ranks among the worst days of anyone's life — but it can still get worse.…

Staff warned that for Q1, non-compliance = 'Disciplinary action'

Exclusive Vodafone is warning staff in the UK to work onsite at least eight days a month or be subject to disciplinary action from April.…

August, 2023: Thousands of Crypto Scammers are Enslaved by Human-Trafficking Gangsters, Says Bloomberg Reporter. ("They'd lure young people from across Southeast Asia...with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling.") February, 2025: A coordinated response begins by Thai, Chinese and Myanmar authorities, which includes cutting power, internet, and fuel supplies to the scam centers. Today: The Associated Press reports that thousands of the people liberated from locked compounds in Myanmar now "have found themselves trapped once again, this time in overcrowded facilities with no medical care, limited food and no idea when they'll be sent home." Thousands of sick, exhausted and terrified young men and women, from countries all over the world squat in rows, packed shoulder to shoulder, surgical masks covering their mouths and eyes. Their nightmare was supposed to be over... The armed groups who are holding the survivors, as well as Thai officials across the border, say they are awaiting action from the detainees' home governments. It's one of the largest potential rescues of forced laborers in modern history, but advocates say the first major effort to crack down on the cyber scam industry has turned into a growing humanitarian crisis... An unconfirmed list provided by authorities in Myanmar says they're holding citizens from 29 countries including Philippines, Kenya and the Czech Republic. Authorities in Thailand say they cannot allow foreigners to cross the border from Myanmar unless they can be sent home immediately, leaving many to wait for help from embassies that has been long in coming. China sent a chartered flight Thursday to the tiny Mae Sot airport to pick up a group of its citizens, but few other governments have matched that. There are roughly 130 Ethiopians waiting in a Thai military base, stuck for want of a $600 plane ticket. Dozens of Indonesians were bused out one morning last week, pushing suitcases and carrying plastic bags with their meager possessions as they headed to Bangkok for a flight home... The recent abrupt halt to U.S. foreign aid funding has made it even harder to get help to released scam center workers... It's not clear how much of an effect these releases will have on the criminal groups that run the scam centers. February marked the third time the Thais have cut internet or electricity to towns across the river. Each time, the compounds have managed to work around the cuts. Large compounds have access to diesel-powered generators, as well as access to internet provider Starlink, experts working with law enforcement say. The article also points out that "The people released are just a small fraction of what could be 300,000 people working in similar scam operations across the region, according to an estimate from the United States Institute of Peace. Human rights groups and analysts add that the networks that run these illegal scams will continue to operate unless much broader action is taken against them..." "The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes estimates that between $18 billion and $37 billion was lost in Asia alone in 2023, with minimal government action against the criminal industry's spread."

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Insiders say board members must be held accountable and drive positive change from the top down

Analysis Walk into any hospital and ask the same question – "Which security system should we invest in?" – to both a doctor and a board member, and you may get different answers. The doctor chooses the system that leads to the most positive patient outcomes, while the board member chooses whichever solution is best for their increasingly stretched budget.…

Mission-critical app migration, 'if it ain't broke...' and more. All that glitters isn't gold when it comes to biz needs

Comment Administrators tend to be a conservative lot, which is bad news for tech vendors such as Microsoft that are seeking to pump their latest and greatest products into enterprises customers via subscriptions.…

Space is the place? Not if you're nuts about neutrinos

Opinion High energy neutrinos are the coolest particles in astrophysics. Born in distant cosmic cataclysms, they speed through the universe almost as if it wasn't there. With no charge and a truly tiny rest mass – perhaps a million times lighter than an electron, but who knows – they interact with virtually nothing.…

Using one green screen to manage multiple machines needs more than a Friday afternoon brain

Who, Me? Shifting focus from weekend fun to the reality of a return to work can be hard, so The Register tries to ease the transition with a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?", our reader-contributed column that tells your stories of making mistakes and making it out alive afterwards.…

The Washington Post reports: Meta was willing to go to extreme lengths to censor content and shut down political dissent in a failed attempt to win the approval of the Chinese Communist Party and bring Facebook to millions of internet users in China, according to a new whistleblower complaint from a former global policy director at the company. The complaint by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked on a team handling China policy, alleges that the social media giant so desperately wanted to enter the lucrative China market that it was willing to allow the ruling party to oversee all social media content appearing in the country and quash dissenting opinions. Meta, then called Facebook, developed a censorship system for China in 2015 and planned to install a "chief editor" who would decide what content to remove and could shut down the entire site during times of "social unrest," according to a copy of the 78-page complaint exclusively seen by The Washington Post. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also agreed to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the United States following pressure from a high-ranking Chinese official the company hoped would help them enter China, according to the complaint, which was filed in April to the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC]. When asked about its efforts to enter China, Meta executives repeatedly "stonewalled and provided nonresponsive or misleading information" to investors and American regulators, according to the complaint. Wynn-Williams bolstered her SEC complaint with internal Meta documents about the company's plans, which were reviewed by The Post. Wynn-Williams, who was fired from her job in 2017, is also scheduled to release a memoir this week documenting her time at the company, titled "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism." According to a memo in the complaint, Meta leaders faced aggressive pressure by Chinese government officials to host Chinese users' data to local data centers, which Wynn-Williams alleges would have made it easier for the Chinese Communist Party to covertly obtain the personal information of its citizens. Wynn-Williams told the Washington Post that "for many years Meta has been working hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party, briefing them on the latest technological developments and lying about it." Reached for a comment, Meta spokesman Andy Stone told the Washington Post it was "no secret" they'd been interested in operating in China. "This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we'd explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019." Although the Post shares new details about what a Facebook privacy policy staffer offer China in negotations in 2014. ("In exchange for the ability to establish operations in China, FB will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users' data — including Hongkongese users' data.") The Post also describes one iteration of a proposed agreement in 2015. "To aid the effort, Meta built a censorship system specially designed for China to review, including the ability to automatically detect restricted terms and popular content on Facebook, according to the complaint... "In 2017, Meta covertly launched a handful of social apps under the name of a China-based company created by one of its employees, according to the complaint."

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Likening memory safety bugs to smallpox may not soothe sensitive C coders

Rust is alive and well in the Linux kernel and is expected to translate into noticeable benefits shortly, though its integration with the largely C-oriented codebase still looks uneasy.…

Prompts see it scour the web for info and turn it into decent documents at reasonable speed

Chinese researchers’ AI prowess is again a hot topic after a startup called Monica.im last week revealed “Manus”, a service it bills as a “general agent” that might improve on tools offered by Western companies.…

Nominated for 10 Oscars, The Brutalist (directed and produced by Brady Corbet) has an "intriguing and controversial technical feature," according to the Baffler, that threatens to turn movie-viewing into "a drab appreciation of machine-managed flawlessness, and acting less interesting..." In January, the film's editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that he and Corbet used tools from AI speech software company Respeecher to make the Hungarian-language dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody (who plays the protagonist, Hungarian émigré architect László Tóth) and Felicity Jones (who plays Tóth's wife Erzsébet) sound more Hungarian. In response to the ensuing backlash, Corbet clarified that the actors worked "for months" with a dialect coach to perfect their accents; AI was used "in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy...." Defenders of this slimy deception claim the use of AI in film is no different than CGI or automated dialogue replacement, tools commonly deployed in the editing suite for picture and audio enhancement. But CGI and ADR don't tamper with the substance of a performance, which is what's at issue here.... AI seems poised to decimate the voice acting industry; how long will it be before filmmakers give up on the whole time-wasting business of dialect coaching and language research and toss their performers' untrained vocalizations directly into the linguistic Instant Pot...? "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," Corbet has argued. Only, they're not. Brody and Jones's performances may now be authentic to spoken Hungarian, but they're no longer authentic to themselves: at least in the parts of the film with Hungarian dialogue, the acting stands more as a monument to the prowess of the voice-matching software than that of the actors... AI is a different beast from color film, or the Louma crane, or the hand-held camera: it's steroidal, aesthetically corrupting, and unlike these earlier advances it confronts the filmmaker with real ethical questions... Use implies complicity. To incorporate AI into the production of art today, no matter how sparingly or subtly, is to endorse Silicon Valley's politics and worldview: its exploitation of both producers and "users," its blithe indifference to the social impact of post-automation layoffs and the environmental assault of industrial data processing, its cramped and uninteresting idea of imagination, its petrification of creation. It's a vote for the assholes... In short, the essays calls this "recourse to corrective AI" a "filmmaking prosthesis that cheats the viewer and cheapens the performances." And ironically this clashes with the film's depiction of a "principled artist," according to the article. ("Some of the 'retro' digital renderings in the memorial video included in this scene were also, Corbet has admitted, produced with the help of AI.") The essay notes that several of 2024's other Oscar-nominated films also employed Respeecher, including Dune: Part Two and Emilia Pérez. "What matters here is not this particular infraction but the precedent it sets, the course it establishes for culture."

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It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP

The body that runs New Zealand’s public health system uses a single Excel spreadsheet as the primary source of data to manage its finances, which aren’t in great shape perhaps due to the sheet’s shortcomings.…

Red Hat product manager Pau Garcia Quiles (also long-time Slashdot reader paugq) spotted an interesting project on GitHub: Free95, a new lean, Windows-compatible operating system is available from GitHub. In its current form, it can run very basic Win32 GUI and console applications, but its developer promises to keep working on it to reach DirectX and even game compatibility. "Free95 is your friendly Windows Environment with an added trust of the open source community," according to its README file. (It's licensed under the GPL-3.0 license.) And in answer to the question "Why?" it responds "To remove Windows's bloat, and security problems. Being controlled by a large corporation is unsettling." "It's still in-development of course," the developer post recently on Reddit, "and I'll appreciate anyone who'd like to contribute." In one comment they claim Free95 is "much more lightweight, simpler and faster than ReactOS." And looking to the future, they add "I might do DirectX stuff and make some games run. Or, what about DOOM?"

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Also, phone cleaner apps are a data-sucking scam, Singapore considering the literal rod for scammers, and more

Infosec in Brief Microsoft has spotted a malvertising campaign that downloaded nastyware hosted on GitHub and exposed nearly a million devices to information thieves.…

Adafruit Industries used large language model (LLM) tool Claude Code to streamline hardware development, writes managing director ptorrone. In a demo video Limor 'Ladyada' Fried compares the LLM's command-line interface to working with the build-automation tool CMake or "a weird cross between IRC and a BBS." The first step was converting a PDF of the hardware's datasheet into text, and Claude Code first displays the appropriate Bash command, while asking "Do you want to proceed?" ("What's nice is that it doesn't make changes, even though it has write access to files in the directory...") Eventually from the data sheet it creates things like an accurate register map, C++ headers, and even license text — and more. "We are using it to automate parts of the coding and debugging process for an Arduino-compatible Metro Mini board with an OPT 4048 color sensor," writes ptorrone: Using Claude Code's shell access, we can compile, upload, and test code in a semi-automated workflow, allowing the LLM to suggest fixes for errors along the way... While the AI isn't perfect for high-level driver development, it's proving VERY useful for tedious debugging and super-fast iterative improvements, bringing hardware automation closer to ...reality. In the video Fried describes it like this. "I have a full debugging cycle, where I'm there — I'm like driving the car — but I have this copilot that's telling me where to go..." "I feel like I'm getting closer to having a semi-automated way of doing driver development."

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PLUS: Malaysia teams with Arm for local chip designs; NTT warns of possible breach; Samsung strikers settle; and more

Asia in Brief India’s government has proposed giving its tax authorities sweeping powers to access private email systems and applications.…