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Bright Data, a company that operates one of the world's largest residential proxy networks, has been running an SDK inside smart TV apps that turns those devices into nodes for web crawling -- collecting data used by AI companies, among other clients -- and most consumers have had no idea it was happening. The company has published more than 200 first-party apps to LG's app store alone and still lists Samsung's Tizen OS and LG's webOS as supported platforms, though LG says the SDK is "not officially supported" and its operation on webOS "is not guaranteed." Google, Amazon, and Roku have all since adopted policies restricting or banning background proxy SDKs, and Bright Data no longer supports those platforms. Several Roku apps still running the SDK disappeared from the store after a journalist with The Verge behind this reporting contacted the company.

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Government and 32 private-sector backers fund push to take on TSMC and Samsung at leading-edge nodes

Japan's fledgling foundry biz Rapidus has secured funding of $1.7 billion to help it progress to mass production of 2nm semiconductors by 2027, making it a potential rival for Taiwan's TSMC.…

OpenAI has closed what is now the largest private financing in history -- a $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation that more than doubles the $40 billion raise it completed just a year ago, itself a record for a private tech company at the time. Amazon invested $50 billion, SoftBank put in $30 billion, and Nvidia committed $30 billion, and additional investors are expected to join as the round progresses. The valuation is a sharp jump from the $500 billion OpenAI commanded in a secondary financing in October, and the round dwarfs recent raises by rivals Anthropic ($30 billion) and xAI ($20 billion). The company has been telling investors it is now targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, a more measured figure than the $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments CEO Sam Altman had touted months earlier. OpenAI is projecting more than $280 billion in total revenue by 2030, split roughly equally between consumer and enterprise. ChatGPT now has over 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million paying subscribers.

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Company refuses to pay ransom as attackers threaten larger daily dumps

The Netherlands' national police is backing Odido's refusal to pay a ransom after ShinyHunters leaked a second round of records belonging to the telco.…

To put that into perspective, 45 GW was peak electricity use for Britain so far this year

About 140 datacenters are in the queue to be connected to Britain's power grid, and their combined energy requirements are estimated to be more than the current peak electricity use for the entire country.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year -- and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones. Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage. Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026. The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal. "Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs -- those below about $500," he told The Register. PC makers could just raise the price of their cheap and cheerful boxes to above that level to compensate for the memory hike, however, price-sensitive buyers simply won't bite, he added. Another factor expected to add to declining fortunes of the PC industry this year is AI devices -- systems equipped with special hardware for accelerating AI tasks, typically via a neural processing unit (NPU) embedded in the CPU. These systems were predicted to take the market by storm, but they require more memory to support AI processing and vendors like to mark them up to a premium price. "Historically, downgrading specifications was the way to go when prices were being squeezed, but that's difficult here," Atwal said. "The thinking was that the average price [of AI PCs] would fall this year, and lead to more adoption," said Atwal, "but that's not happening." The lack of killer applications isn't helping either.

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Most DSAG members willing to pay a premium to stay on legacy platform until 2030

About half of German-speaking SAP users on its legacy ECC ERP system are set to ignore the 2027 support deadline, according to a survey of users in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.…

French firm claims DWP failed to identify rival's bid was 'abnormally low' and alleges govt breached procurement rules

Sopra Steria is suing the UK government, alleging it accepted a bid from rival Capita for an outsourcing contract worth up to £958.7 million that it failed to recognize as too low to comply with procurement rules.…

Snack giant opts for vendor-neutral process mining as it shifts from ECC to S/4HANA

In the middle of a mammoth migration off SAP's legacy ERP systems, global snack giant Mondelēz has found an alternative to the German vendor's tech as the main platform for understanding its complex, fragmented business processes.…

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: For decades, planetary scientists have pored over a mystery hidden within the Moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and '70s. Minerals in the rocks record the imprint of a magnetic field, nearly as powerful as Earth's, that existed more than 3.5 billion years ago and seemed to persist for millions of years. But generating a magnetic field requires a dynamo -- a churning, molten core -- and most researchers believed the Moon's tiny core would have long since cooled off, 1 billion years after it formed. Corroborating that picture are other ancient Moon rocks of about the same age that suggest the field was weak -- leaving planetary scientists baffled. Now, researchers are proposing a new way to solve the puzzle. A paper published today in Nature Geoscience theorizes that between 3.5 billion and 4 billion years ago, blobs of titanium-rich magma melted episodically just above the core, rising in plumes that drove volcanic eruptions on the surface. By intermittently stirring up the Moon's core, these bouts of melting would have caused the Moon's magnetic field to flicker on in short, powerful bursts. The paper "links a few different concepts that people were thinking about separately, but hadn't actually brought together," says Sonia Tikoo, a planetary geophysicist at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.

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Typing 8x more than your peers? You better have the work to show for it

Avon and Somerset Police this week confirmed a former officer was dismissed after she was found weighing her laptop keyboard down with photo frames to simulate activity.…

'I was no longer field support. I was collateral'

On Call Friday has arrived, bringing a promise of fleeting freedom – and a new instalment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that retells your tales of tech support incidents that became memorable for all the wrong reasons.…

Longtime Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from NBC News: NASA revealed that astronaut Mike Fincke was the crew member who suffered a medical incident at the International Space Station in January, which prompted the agency to carry out the first evacuation due to a medical issue in the space station's 25-year history. The rare decision to cut a mission short and bring Fincke and three other crew members home early made for a dramatic week in space early this year. In a statement released by NASA "at the request of Fincke," the veteran astronaut said he experienced a medical event on Jan. 7 "that required immediate attention" from his space station crew members. "Thanks to their quick response and the guidance of our NASA flight surgeons, my status quickly stabilized," Fincke, 58, said in the statement. [...] In his statement, Fincke thanked his Crew-11 colleagues, along with NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, who were also aboard the space station at the time and are still in space. Fincke also thanked the teams at NASA, SpaceX and the medical professionals at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla. "Their professionalism and dedication ensured a positive outcome," he said. Fincke ended his statement by saying he is "doing very well" and still actively involved with standard post-flight reconditioning at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "Spaceflight is an incredible privilege, and sometimes it reminds us just how human we are," he said. "Thank you for all your support."

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Dell also joins the basic devices for Windows 365 fun

Microsoft has found some friends to make desktop devices that boot into its Windows 365 cloud PCs.…

Apparently Uncle Sam busted Binance to shore up the dollar, balance the budget, and achieve world domination

The Chinese agency that has accused the USA of cyberattacks on its own infrastructure to make Beijing look bad is back with another theory: Washington’s actions against cryptocurrency crooks are just attempts to dominate the global financial system.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday the artificial intelligence company "cannot in good conscience accede" to the Pentagon's demands to allow wider use of its technology. The maker of the AI chatbot Claude said in a statement that it's not walking away from negotiations, but that new contract language received from the Defense Department "made virtually no progress on preventing Claude's use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons." The Pentagon's top spokesman has reiterated that the military wants to use Anthropic's artificial intelligence technology in legal ways and will not let the company dictate any limits ahead of a Friday deadline to agree to its demands. Sean Parnell said Thursday on social media that the Pentagon "has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement." Anthropic's policies prevent its models, such as its chatbot Claude, from being used for those purposes. It's the last of its peers -- the Pentagon also has contracts with Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI -- to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network. Parnell said the Pentagon wants to "use Anthropic's model for all lawful purposes" but didn't offer details on what that entailed. He said opening up use of the technology would prevent the company from "jeopardizing critical military operations." "We will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions," he said. In a post on X, Parnell said Anthropic will "have until 5:01 PM ET on Friday to decide. Otherwise, we will terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deem them a supply chain risk for DOW."

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AI upstart won’t remove Claude’s guardrails to stay onside with Dept. of War

Anthropic has fired back at the US Department of War, arguing that it can’t agree to Uncle Sam’s contract demand to remove guardrails on its AI in part because the tech can’t be trusted not to harm American civilians and warfighters.…

A Greek court has convicted four individuals linked to the marketing of Predator spyware in the wiretapping scandal that shook the country in 2022. The BBC reports: In what became known as "Greece's Watergate," surveillance software called Predator was used to target 87 people -- among them government ministers, senior military officials and journalists. The four who had marketed the software were found guilty by an Athens court of misdemeanours of violating the confidentiality of telephone communications and illegally accessing personal data and conversations. The court sentenced the four defendants to lengthy jail sentences, suspended pending appeal. Although they each face 126 years, only eight would be typically served which is the upper limit for misdemeanors. One in three of the dozens of figures targeted had also been under legal surveillance by Greece's intelligence services (EYP). Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who had placed EYP directly under his supervision, called it a scandal, but no government officials have been charged in court and critics accuse the government of trying to cover up the truth. The case dates back to the summer of 2022, when the current head of Greek Socialist party Pasok, Nikos Androulakis - then an MEP - was informed by the European Parliament's IT experts that he had received a malicious text message containing a link. Predator spyware, marketed by the Athens-based Israeli company Intellexa, can get access to a device's messages, camera, and microphone. Its use was illegal in Greece at that time but a new law passed in 2022 has since legalised state security use of surveillance software under strict conditions. Androulakis also discovered that he had been tracked for "national security reasons" by Greece's intelligence services. The scandal has since escalated into a debate over democratic accountability in Greece.

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One massive round of firings is apparently better for morale than a drip-drip-drip of death

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”…

Grants for critical, unappreciated projects

Open source projects, ever short of funding, have a potential new source of revenue in the form of the Open Source Endowment (OSE).…