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We suspect Philippe Salle will need it, not to mention staff and customers

If at first you don't succeed, transform, transform, and transform again is the corporate motto at Atos these days. The lumbering French-based megacorp has created another blueprint to return to its glory days, and it includes job cuts, offshoring and... AI.…

Success of UK's Universal Credit has lessons for government IT projects, former minister claims

Former UK government minister Sir Iain Duncan Smith has told a committee of MPs that the digitization of Universal Credit is a success story other government departments can learn from.…

China launched 12 satellites on Wednesday as part of the âoeThree-Body Computing Constellation,â the worldâ(TM)s first dedicated orbital computing network led by ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab. SpaceNews reports: A Long March 2D rocket lifted off at 12:12 a.m. Eastern (0412 UTC) May 14 from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China. Insulation tiles fell away from the payload fairing as the rocket climbed into a clear blue sky above the spaceport. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced a fully successful launch, revealing the mission to have sent 12 satellites for a space computing constellation into orbit. Commercial company ADA Space released further details, stating that the 12 satellites form the "Three-Body Computing Constellation," which will directly process data in space, rather than on the ground, reducing reliance on ground-based computing infrastructure. The constellation will be capable of a combined 5 peta operations per second (POPS) with 30 terabytes of onboard storage. The satellites feature advanced AI capabilities, up to 100 Gbps laser inter-satellite links and remote sensing payloads -- data from which will be processed onboard, reducing data transmission requirements. One satellite also carries a cosmic X-ray polarimeter developed by Guangxi University and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), which will detect, identify and classify transient events such as gamma-ray bursts, while also triggering messages to enable followup observations by other missions. [...] The company says the constellation can meet the growing demand for real-time computing in space, as well as help China take the lead globally in building space computing infrastructure, seize the commanding heights of this future industry. The development could mark the beginning of space-based cloud computing as a new capability, as well as open a new arena for strategic competition with the U.S. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

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DPM signs off 96MW bit barn, citing national policy shift

The British government has stepped in to overturn a local council's refusal of a proposed datacenter on green belt land, citing updated national planning policy that urges councils to find space for bit barns, labs, gigafactories, and other strategic infrastructure.…

After UK spends hundreds of millions, several say existing systems are better

English hospitals are voicing their concern about the functionality provided by Palantir, the US spy-tech firm that won a £330 million ($437 million) deal to run the Federated Data Platform for NHS England, as around a third of trusts go live on the system.…

Self-taught coders who work in HR and have a doctorate in English tend to do that

On Call Bosses often ask IT pros to clean up messes made by amateurs, and in this week's On Call – The Register's reader-contributed tech support column – we have just such a tale to tell.…

Dartmouth researchers propose that dark matter originated from massless, light-like particles in the early universe that rapidly condensed into massive particles through a spin-based interaction. Phys.Org reports: [T]he study authors write that their theory is distinct because it can be tested using existing observational data. The extremely low-energy particles they suggest make up dark matter would have a unique signature on the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang that fills all of the universe. "Dark matter started its life as near-massless relativistic particles, almost like light," says Robert Caldwell, a professor of physics and astronomy and the paper's senior author. "That's totally antithetical to what dark matter is thought to be -- it is cold lumps that give galaxies their mass," Caldwell says. "Our theory tries to explain how it went from being light to being lumps." Hot, fast-moving particles dominated the cosmos after the burst of energy known as the Big Bang that scientists believe triggered the universe's expansion 13.7 billion years ago. These particles were similar to photons, the massless particles that are the basic energy, or quanta, of light. It was in this chaos that extremely large numbers of these particles bonded to each other, according to Caldwell and Guanming Liang, the study's first author and a Dartmouth senior. They theorize that these massless particles were pulled together by the opposing directions of their spin, like the attraction between the north and south poles of magnets. As the particles cooled, Caldwell and Liang say, an imbalance in the particles' spins caused their energy to plummet, like steam rapidly cooling into water. The outcome was the cold, heavy particles that scientists think constitute dark matter. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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Gives both platforms the ‘generative AI will freshen it up and shift it to the cloud’ treatment

In 2017 Amazon Web Services and VMware were best buddies as they launched a combined cloud service. In 2025 AWS is dismissing Virtzilla as a legacy outfit that needs to be re-platformed to the cloud ASAP before it sinks your business.…

Fears surrendering to GenAI makes humans less competitive

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson has suggested AIs should be allowed to fight other AIs, because evolution brings balance to ecosystems, but also thinks humans should stop using AI before it dumbs down our species.…

Lawyers prepare to get suited and booted if 'Plan B' to address unfair competition claims is a no show

Microsoft has failed to deliver a special version of Azure for EU cloud providers on time, raising the specter of legal action if it is unable to devise a "commercially equivalent solution" in less than two months' time.…

A Northeastern University student demanded her tuition money back after discovering her business professor was secretly using AI to create course materials. Ella Stapleton, who graduated this year, grew suspicious when she noticed telltale signs of AI generation in her professor's lecture notes, including a stray ChatGPT citation in the bibliography, recurring typos matching machine outputs, and images showing figures with extra limbs. "He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told the New York Times. After filing a formal complaint with Northeastern's business school, Stapleton requested a tuition refund of about $8,000 for the course. The university ultimately rejected her claim. Professor Rick Arrowood acknowledged using ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and presentation generator Gamma. "In hindsight, I wish I would have looked at it more closely," he said.

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An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from The Guardian, written by columnist Emma Brockes: Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a promotional tour to talk up the potential of AI in human relationships. I know; listening to Zuck on friendship is a bit like taking business advice from Bernie Madoff or lessons in sportsmanship from Tonya Harding. But at recent tech conferences and on podcasts, Zuck has been saying he has seen the future and it's one in which the world's "loneliness epidemic" is alleviated by people finding friendship with "a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do." In essence, we'll be friends with AI, instead of people. The missing air quotes around "knows" and "understands" is a distinction we can assume Zuck neither knows nor understands. This push by the 41-year-old tech leader would be less startling if it weren't for the fact that semi-regularly online now you can find people writing about their relationships with their AI therapist or chatbot and insisting that if it's real to them, then it's real, period. The chatbot is, they will argue, "actively" listening to them. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel last month Zuck envisaged a near-future in which "you'll be scrolling through your feed, and there will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it and it talks back." The average American, he said, has fewer than three friends but needs more. Hey presto, a ready solution. The problem, obviously, isn't that chatting to a bot gives the illusion of intimacy, but that, in Zuckerberg's universe, it is indistinguishable from real intimacy, an equivalent and equally meaningful version of human-to-human contact. If that makes no sense, suggests Zuck, then either the meaning of words has to change or we have to come up with new words: "Over time," says Zuckerberg, as more and more people turn to AI friends, "we'll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable." ... The sheer wrongness of this argument is so stark that it puts anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought in the weird position of having to define units of reality as basic as "person." To extend Zuckerberg's logic: a book can make you feel less alone and that feeling can be real. Which doesn't mean that your relationship with the author is genuine, intimate or reciprocated in anything like the way a relationship with your friends is.

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Cupertino's plan to spend $500bn stateside wasn’t enough to placate the tycoon of tariffs

US president Donald Trump has told Apple CEO Tim Cook he has a problem with his plan to manufacture iThings in India.…

YouTube has suspended ad revenue for two additional channels -- Screen Trailers and Royal Trailer -- as part of an ongoing effort to combat fake movie trailers using AI-generated content. These channels, alternative accounts of previously demonetized Screen Culture and KH Studio, splice actual movie footage with AI-generated material, often accumulating millions of views. The action follows a recent Deadline investigation revealing Hollywood studios had requested YouTube redirect revenue from these misleading videos. Despite losing monetization, Screen Culture, which has 1.42 million subscribers, continues uploading content including a recent "Trailer 2 concept" for James Gunn's upcoming Superman film.

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Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said Thursday that Apple has "neither accepted nor rejected" Fortnite's second App Store submission, potentially delaying the game's major update planned for Friday. Epic initially submitted Fortnite on May 9 following Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' order for Apple to comply with the original 2021 injunction. After five days without response, Epic withdrew and resubmitted to accommodate the upcoming update. While Apple's guidelines state 90% of submissions are reviewed within 24 hours, this silence is unprecedented. The legal context remains complex -- the judge's original ruling didn't require Apple to reinstate Fortnite, as she determined Epic had willingly violated agreed-upon rules. Meanwhile, Sweeney is actively pointing out on X that Fortnite knock-offs are flooding the App Store.

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They're smishing, they're vishing

The FBI has warned that fraudsters are impersonating "senior US officials" using deepfakes as part of a major fraud campaign.…

The FBI has issued a warning that cybercriminals have started using AI-generated voice deepfakes in phishing attacks impersonating senior U.S. officials. These attacks, involving smishing and vishing tactics, aim to compromise personal accounts and contacts for further social engineering and financial fraud. BleepingComputer reports: "Since April 2025, malicious actors have impersonated senior U.S. officials to target individuals, many of whom are current or former senior U.S. federal or state government officials and their contacts. If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior U.S. official, do not assume it is authentic," the FBI warned. "The malicious actors have sent text messages and AI-generated voice messages -- techniques known as smishing and vishing, respectively -- that claim to come from a senior U.S. official in an effort to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts." The attackers can gain access to the accounts of U.S. officials by sending malicious links disguised as links designed to move the discussion to another messaging platform. By compromising their accounts, the threat actors can gain access to other government officials' contact information. Next, they can use social engineering to impersonate the compromised U.S. officials to steal further sensitive information and trick targeted contacts into transferring funds. Today's PSA follows a March 2021 FBI Private Industry Notification (PIN) [PDF] warning that deepfakes (including AI-generated or manipulated audio, text, images, or video) would likely be widely employed in "cyber and foreign influence operations" after becoming increasingly sophisticated.

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Microsoft has stopped production of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and will mark it as end-of-life in June, with no successor currently planned. Tom's Hardware reports: The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is being put out to pasture quietly, much like other devices that the company has sunset. The Surface Studio, a desktop PC that folded down into a creative studio for drawing, was formally discontinued in December without a successor. Microsoft's audio products, the Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds, have also quietly disappeared. The Surface Laptop Studio's discontinuance comes at a hazy time for the Surface brand. On the one hand, two new devices -- the Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch -- were just announced and are set to release next week. On the other hand, the lineup lost its champion, former chief Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023, reportedly over budget issues and product cancellations. Panay was succeeded by Pavan Davuluri. Since Panay's departure, the lineup has been cut down to just the Surface Laptop, Surface Pro, and the Surface Go 4, the latter of which is only sold to business customers at the moment. Without the Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft has removed systems with discrete GPUs from its hardware lineup, potentially alienating creatives and gamers. Prior to the Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft's powerhouse system was the Surface Book, which combined a tablet with a base featuring a discrete GPU.

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Entire process took less than five minutes, prosecutors say

A former DoorDash driver has pleaded guilty to participating in a $2.59 million scheme that used fake accounts, insider access to reassign orders, and bogus delivery reports to trigger payouts for food that was never delivered.…

At its second annual Upfront 2025 event yesterday, Netflix announced that it has created interactive mid-roll ads and pause ads that incorporate generative AI. These new ad formats are expected to roll out in 2026. Ars Technica reports: "[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves," Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said. Netflix started testing pause ads in July 2024, per The Verge. Speaking to advertisers, Reinhard claimed that ad subscribers spend 41 hours per month on Netflix on average. The new ad formats follow Netflix's launch of its own in-house advertising platform in the US in April. It had previously debuted the platform in Canada and plans to expand it globally by June, per The Verge. Netflix considers its advertising business to be in its early stages, meaning customers can expect the firm's ad efforts to continue expanding at a faster rate over the coming years. The company plans to double its advertising revenue in 2025. "The foundations of our ads business are in place, and going forward, the pace of progress will be even faster," Reinhard said today. Further reading: Netflix Says Its Ad Tier Now Has 94 Million Monthly Active Users

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