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Apple's upcoming macOS 26 operating system may abandon support for several older Mac models, according to AppleInsider. The casualties will include 2018 MacBook Pro models, the 2020 Intel MacBook Air, the 2017 iMac Pro, and the 2018 Mac mini -- all currently the oldest machines compatible with macOS Sequoia, the report said, citing a source familiar with the matter. The 2019 MacBook Pro models and 2020 5K iMac models will retain compatibility with the new system, codenamed "Cheer," said AppleInsider.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: HP is close to ending production of North-America-bound products in China, after US tariffs kicked a hole in its quarterly profits. "A quarter ago, we shared that our goal was to have less than ten percent of the products in North America being shipped from China by September," HP president and CEO Enrique Lores told investors on the company's Q2 2025 earnings call. "We have accelerated that and we share that now almost no products will be coming from China sold in the US by June. It's a very significant acceleration of the plan that we have." "We accelerated the shift of factories out from China into Southeast Asia, into Mexico to a certain extent in the US to mitigate the impact of the change," he added. Lores also revealed that HP has removed the US as a distribution hub for products sold in Canada or to Latin America. Doing so means HP doesn't have to pay tariffs.

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No, that's not someone on your team who doesn't pull their weight

Salesforce is promising every Slack user a "digital teammate" to help with tasks such as providing summaries of channels and taking notes from meetings. And responding to office banter on the user's behalf, The Register can only assume.…

Arizona State University researchers are pushing back [PDF] against the widespread practice of describing AI language models' intermediate text generation as "reasoning" or "thinking," arguing this anthropomorphization creates dangerous misconceptions about how these systems actually work. The research team, led by Subbarao Kambhampati, examined recent "reasoning" models like DeepSeek's R1, which generate lengthy intermediate token sequences before providing final answers to complex problems. Though these models show improved performance and their intermediate outputs often resemble human scratch work, the researchers found little evidence that these tokens represent genuine reasoning processes. Crucially, the analysis also revealed that models trained on incorrect or semantically meaningless intermediate traces can still maintain or even improve performance compared to those trained on correct reasoning steps. The researchers tested this by training models on deliberately corrupted algorithmic traces and found sustained improvements despite the semantic noise. The paper warns that treating these intermediate outputs as interpretable reasoning traces engenders false confidence in AI capabilities and may mislead both researchers and users about the systems' actual problem-solving mechanisms.

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Against backdrop of EU rules on spread of misinfo plus UK probing role of online hate in far right riots

The US government says it'll refuse visas to foreign officials judged to have censored social media posts of American citizens - a move aimed at countries trying to stem the flow of online misinformation.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Researchers at SignalFire, a data-driven VC firm that tracks job movements of over 600 million employees and 80 million companies on LinkedIn, believe they may be seeing first signs of AI's impact on hiring. When analyzing hiring trends, SignalFire noticed that tech companies recruited fewer recent college graduates in 2024 than they did in 2023. Meanwhile, tech companies, especially the top 15 Big Tech businesses, ramped up their hiring of experienced professionals. Specifically, SignalFire found that Big Tech companies reduced the hiring of new graduates by 25% in 2024 compared to 2023. Meanwhile, graduate recruitment at startups decreased by 11% compared to the prior year. Although SignalFire wouldn't reveal exactly how many fewer grads were hired according to their data, a spokesperson told us it was thousands. While adoption of new AI tools might not fully explain the dip in recent grad hiring, Asher Bantock, SignalFire's head of research, says there's "convincing evidence" that AI is a significant contributing factor. Entry-level jobs are susceptible to automation because they often involve routine, low-risk tasks that generative AI handles well. AI's new coding, debugging, financial research, and software installation abilities could mean companies need fewer people to do that type of work. AI's ability to handle certain entry-level tasks means some jobs for new graduates could soon be obsolete. [...] Although AI's threat to low-skilled jobs is real, tech companies' need for experienced professionals is still rising. According to SignalFire's report, Big Tech companies increased hiring by 27% for professionals with two to five years of experience, while startups hired 14% more individuals in that same seniority range. A frustrating paradox emerges for recent graduates: They can't get hired without experience, but they can't get experience without being hired. While this dilemma is not new, Heather Doshay, SignalFire's people and talent partner, says it is considerably exacerbated by AI. Doshay's advice to new grads: master AI tools. "AI won't take your job if you're the one who's best at using it," she said.

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Law enforcement crackdowns are gathering pace but online marketplaces still teeming with valuable tokens

A VPN vendor says billions of stolen cookies currently on sale either on dark web or Telegram-based marketplaces remain active and exploitable.…

Users leaving App Store to make a third party payment must be free of charge, says Euro Commish

The European Commission (EC) this week released the full text of its decision that found Apple in violation of its digital competition rules, known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA).…

Even when instructed to allow shutdown, o3 sometimes tries to prevent it, research claims

A research organization claims that OpenAI machine learning model o3 might prevent itself from being shut down in some circumstances while completing an unrelated task.…

The world is facing a new form of climate denial -- not the dismissal of climate science, but a concerted attack on the idea that the economy can be reorganised to fight the crisis, the president of global climate talks has warned. The Guardian reports: Andre Correa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat who will direct this year's UN summit, Cop30, believes his biggest job will be to counter the attempt from some vested interests to prevent climate policies aimed at shifting the global economy to a low-carbon footing. "There is a new kind of opposition to climate action. We are facing a discredit of climate policies. I don't think we are facing climate denial," he said, referring to the increasingly desperate attempts to pretend there is no consensus on climate science that have plagued climate action for the past 30 years. "It's not a scientific denial, it's an economic denial." This economic denial could be just as dangerous and cause as much delay as repeated attempts to deny climate science in previous years, he warned in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.

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Sick of paying the US tech tax and relinquishing talent to other continents, politicians finally wake up

The European Commission (EC) has kicked off a scheme to make Europe a better place to nurture global technology businesses, providing support throughout their lifecycle, from startup through to maturity.…

Wiggles tiny price for FishOS Ceph-based wares as deprecation of Ceph continues

Sardina hopes to entice anyone still using SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) over to FishOS instead with a price-based hook: a license fee of €1 per core, regardless of storage volume.…

Tianwen 2 probe launched Thursday and will also get up close with a comet

China’s National Space Agency today launched the nation’s first asteroid sample mission.…

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious cosmic object, ASKAP J1832-0911, that emits both radio waves and X-rays in precise 44-minute cycles, making it unlike anything observed before. Space.com reports: This is the first time an object like this, a so-called "long-period transient" or "LPT," has been seen in high-energy X-ray light as well as low-energy radio wave light. The team behind this discovery hopes the finding could help reveal what these flashing objects actually are and how they launch their mystery signals. However, not only is there no explanation for how the signals from LPTs are generated yet, but astronomers also don't know why these signals "switch on" and "switch off" at long, regular and unusual intervals. "This object is unlike anything we have seen before," team leader and Curtin University researcher Zieng (Andy) Wang said in a statement. [...] The team believes the true nature of ASKAP J1832-0911 is a dead star, they just don't quite know what form that star takes. A highly magnetic neutron star, or "magnetar," is one option, and a a white dwarf -- the kind of stellar remnant the sun will leave behind when it dies in over 5 billion years -- is another. "ASKAP J1831- 0911 could be a magnetar, the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields, or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetized white dwarf, a low-mass star at the end of its evolution," Wang said. "However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing. "This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution." The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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Hiked prices and thinks that will make buyers nervous

HP Inc. is close to ending production of North-America-bound products in China, after US tariffs kicked a hole in its quarterly profits.…

‘Consumers will not tolerate deceit’ Minister tells Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Uber

India’s government has reminded big tech companies that it has rules that prohibit the use of dark patterns – deceptive design practices that deliberately mislead and confuse customers of online services and apps – and called for an end to their use.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data broker that collects and uses consumers' personal data to help its paying corporate customers detect possible risk and fraud, has disclosed a data breach affecting more than 364,000 people. The company said in a filing with Maine's attorney general that the breach, dating back to December 25, 2024, allowed a hacker to obtain consumers' sensitive personal data from a third-party platform used by the company for software development. Jennifer Richman, a spokesperson for LexisNexis, told TechCrunch that an unknown hacker accessed the company's GitHub account. The stolen data varies, but includes names, dates of birth, phone numbers, postal and email addresses, Social Security numbers, and driver license numbers. It's not immediately clear what circumstances led to the breach. Richman said LexisNexis received a report on April 1, 2025 "from an unknown third party claiming to have accessed certain information." The company would not say if it had received a ransom demand from the hacker.

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Hardware biz gets a reprieve but administration’s plans are unchanged

World War Fee The USA’s Court of International Trade has ruled the Trump administration improperly implemented its “Liberation Day” tariff policy, effectively blocking the imposition of the duties.…

Microsoft is previewing a new Windows Update orchestration platform that lets third-party apps schedule and manage updates alongside system updates, "aiming to centralize update scheduling across Windows 11 devices," reports The Register. From the report: On Tuesday, Redmond announced it's allowing a select group of developers and product teams to hook into the Windows 11 update framework. The system doesn't push updates itself but allows apps to register their own update logic via WinRT APIs and PowerShell, enabling centralized scheduling, logging, and policy enforcement. "Updates across the Windows ecosystem can feel like a fragmented experience," wrote Angie Chen, a product manager at the Borg, in a blog post. "To solve this, we're building a vision for a unified, intelligent update orchestration platform capable of supporting any update (apps, drivers, etc.) to be orchestrated alongside Windows updates." As with other Windows updates, the end user or admin will be able to benefit from intelligent scheduling, with updates deferred based on user activity, system performance, AC power status, and other environmental factors. For example, updates may install when the device is idle or plugged in, to minimize disruption. All update actions will be logged and surfaced through a unified diagnostic system, helping streamline troubleshooting. Microsoft says the platform will support MSIX/APPX apps, as well as Win32 apps that include custom installation logic, provided developers integrate with the offered Windows Runtime (WinRT) APIs and PowerShell commands. At the moment, the orchestration platform is available only as a private preview. Developers must contact unifiedorchestrator@service.microsoft.com to request access. Redmond is taking a cautious approach, given the risk of update conflicts, but may broaden availability depending on how the preview performs. Meanwhile, Windows Backup for Organizations, first unveiled at Microsoft Ignite in November 2024, has entered limited public preview. Redmond touts the service as a way to back up Windows 10 and 11 devices and restore them with the same settings in place. It's saying it'll be a big help in migrating systems to the more recent operating systems after Windows 10 goes end of life in October. "With Windows Backup for Organizations, get your users up and running as quickly as possible with their familiar Windows settings already in place," Redmond wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "It doesn't matter if they're experiencing a device reimage or reset."

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But don't worry, sales are still up 69 percent

US export controls blocking the sale of Nvidia’s H20 GPUs to will cost the company $10.5 billion in lost revenues in the first half of the 2026 fiscal year, executives revealed on Wednesday's Q1 earnings call.…