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Catch: you have to plug it into a computer first

If you’ve ever watched Mission Impossible, where Jim Phelps gets instructions from an audio tape that catches fire after five seconds, TeamGroup has an external SSD with your name on it. The T-Create Expert P35S is a portable USB-powered SSD that comes with a self-destruct button, which wipes all your data and physically renders the device useless.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US crackdown on chip exports to China has continued with the arrests of four people accused of a conspiracy to illegally export Nvidia chips. Two US citizens and two nationals of the People's Republic of China (PRC), all of whom live in the US, were charged in an indictment (PDF) unsealed on Wednesday in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The indictment alleges a scheme to send Nvidia "GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading US authorities," John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's National Security Division, said in a press release yesterday. The four arrestees are Hon Ning Ho (aka Mathew Ho), a US citizen who was born in Hong Kong and lives in Tampa, Florida; Brian Curtis Raymond, a US citizen who lives in Huntsville, Alabama; Cham Li (aka Tony Li), a PRC national who lives in San Leandro, California; and Jing Chen (aka Harry Chen), a PRC national who lives in Tampa on an F-1 non-immigrant student visa. The suspects face a raft of charges for conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, smuggling, and money laundering. They could serve many decades in prison if convicted and given the maximum sentences and forfeit their financial gains. The indictment says that Chinese companies paid the conspirators nearly $3.9 million. One of the suspects was briefly the CTO of Corvex, a Virginia-based AI cloud computing company that is planning to go public. Corvex told CNBC yesterday that it "had no part in the activities cited in the Department of Justice's indictment," and that "the person in question is not an employee of Corvex. Previously a consultant to the company, he was transitioning into an employee role but that offer has been rescinded."

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British soldiers are using computer games such as Call of Duty to sharpen their "war-fighting readiness," an Army chief has said. From a report: General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, the deputy commander of Cyber and Specialist Operations Command, said the war in Ukraine, where remote-operated drones have become crucial on the battlefield, proved the worth of having soldiers skilled in video gaming. The Ministry of Defence on Friday announced the launch of the International Defence Esports Games (IDEG), a video gaming tournament that will pit the best of Britain's "future cyber warriors" against military teams from 40 other countries.

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RECAP agent overcomes model alignment efforts to hide memorized proprietary content

If you've ever wondered whether that chatbot you're using knows the entire text of a particular book, answers are on the way. Computer scientists have developed a more effective way to coax memorized content from large language models, a development that may address regulatory concerns while helping to clarify copyright infringement claims arising from AI model training and inference.…

The Japanese government said that the world's biggest nuclear plant would restart operations. Semafor: The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa site closed in 2012, as Japan -- which previously generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear power -- shuttered most of its fleet in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. But like much of the world, it is looking once again to nuclear power for reliable, low-carbon energy, especially in the face of high gas and oil prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It has restarted 14 out of 54 plants and announced plans for a first new reactor since the disaster.

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Google confirmed in a statement Friday that hackers have stolen the Salesforce-stored data of more than 200 companies in a large-scale supply chain hack. TechCrunch reports: On Thursday, Salesforce disclosed a breach of "certain customers' Salesforce data" -- without naming affected companies -- that was stolen via apps published by Gainsight, which provides a customer support platform to other companies. In a statement, Austin Larsen, the principal threat analyst of Google Threat Intelligence Group, said that the company "is aware of more than 200 potentially affected Salesforce instances." After Salesforce announced the breach, the notorious and somewhat-nebulous hacking group known as Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, which includes the ShinyHunters gang, claimed responsibility for the hacks in a Telegram channel, which TechCrunch has seen.

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Shiny talks to The Reg

EXCLUSIVE ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for the Gainsight breach that allowed the data thieves to snarf data from hundreds more Salesforce customers.…

Microsoft has acknowledged in a support article that major Windows 11 core features including the Start Menu, Taskbar, File Explorer and System Settings break after applying monthly cumulative updates released on or after July 2025. The problems stem from XAML component issues that affect updates beginning with July's Patch Tuesday release (KB5062553). The failures occur during first-time user logins after cumulative updates are applied and on non-persistent OS installations like virtual desktop infrastructure setups. Microsoft lists Explorer.exe crashes, shellhost.exe crashes, StartMenuExperienceHost failures and System Settings that silently refuse to launch among the symptoms. The company provided PowerShell commands and batch scripts as temporary workarounds that re-register the affected packages. Both Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 share the same codebase and are affected. Microsoft said it is working on a fix but did not provide a timeline.

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But the Wiring folks were disenchanted even before Qualcomm swallowed Arduino

Qualcomm quietly rewrote the terms of service for its newest acquisition, programmable microcontroller and SBC maker Arduino, drawing intense fire from the maker community for grabbing additional rights to user-generated content on its platform and prohibiting reverse-engineering of what was once very open software.…

Thunderbird Pro has moved its Thundermail email service into production testing as the open-source email client's subscription bundle of additional services prepares for an Early Bird beta launch at $9 per month that will include email hosting, encrypted file sharing through Send, and scheduling via Appointment. Internal team members are now testing Thundermail accounts and the new Thunderbird Pro add-on automatically adds Thundermail accounts for users who sign up through it. The project migrated its data hosting from the Americas to Germany and the EU. Appointment received a major visual redesign being applied across all three services while Send completed an external security review and moved from its standalone add-on into the unified Thunderbird Pro add-on. The new website at tb.pro is live for signups and account management.

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Adam Marshall spent more than a decade developing Kingdoms of the Dump while working as a custodian at a school in suburban Philadelphia, cleaning floors and hauling trash bags from 3 PM to 11 PM before coming home to work on his turn-based role-playing game until 5 or 6 AM. The game, which Bloomberg has called "one of the year's most charming RPGs," came out on Tuesday after Marshall and his childhood friend Matt Loiseau -- also a janitor -- built it using RPG Maker alongside a small team of hobbyists who mostly worked for free. The pair launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2019 that raised $76,560, but the pandemic disrupted their plans and forced them to lose contractors and rethink their approach. Marshall maintained this schedule for five years straight before quitting his custodial job last year to finish the game full-time. Kingdoms of the Dump has sold about 7,000 copies since its release. The game stars a walking trashcan named Dustin Binsley who adventures through landfills and sewers in a world made entirely of garbage.

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It's unclear how much scandium and gallium ElementUSA will contribute to the supply chain, or when

The US Department of Defense is asserting its desire to be an integral part of the American rare earths and critical minerals supply chain with a deal to establish a domestic pipeline of gallium and scandium production.…

AI nutrition tracking features in popular fitness apps are producing wildly inaccurate calorie and macro counts despite promises to simplify food logging through automated photo analysis. The Verge tested AI-powered nutrition tools in Ladder, Oura Advisor, January and MyFitnessPal. Ladder's AI estimated the outlet's carefully measured 355-calorie breakfast at 780 calories and got the macro breakdown wrong even after the reviewer manually edited entries to include exact brands and amounts. Oura Advisor routinely mistook matcha protein shakes for green smoothies. January misidentified barbecue sauce as teriyaki sauce and failed to detect mushrooms in a chicken dish. None of the apps could identify healthier ingredient swaps or accurately log ethnic foods. Oura classified a mix of edamame, quinoa and brown rice as mashed potatoes and white rice. Ladder logged dal makhani curry as chicken soup. The AI features require extensive manual corrections that negate any time savings from automated logging, the publication concluded in its scathing review.

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Cost of insuring against Oracle debt default spikes as September seems a long time ago

opinion The weather's cooling, and so is Wall Street's patience with Oracle's AI makeover. Big Red is spending big, and the risk metrics aren't looking cozy.…

Poetry proves potent jailbreak tool for today's top models

Are you a wizard with words? Do you like money without caring how you get it? You could be in luck now that a new role in cybercrime appears to have opened up – poetic LLM jailbreaking.…

Amazon's 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company's sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers. CNBC: Documents filed in New York, California, New Jersey and Amazon's home state of Washington showed that nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 job cuts in those states were engineering roles. The data was reported by Amazon in Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, filings to state agencies. The figures represent a segment of the total layoffs announced in October. Not all data was immediately available because of differences in state WARN reporting requirements.

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Meta is venturing into the complex world of electricity trading, betting it can accelerate the construction of new US power plants that are vital to its AI ambitions. From a report: The foray into power trading comes after Meta heard from investors and plant developers that too few power buyers were willing to make the early, long-term commitments required to spur investment, according to Urvi Parekh, the company's head of global energy. Trading electricity will give the company the flexibility to enter more of those longer contracts. Plant developers "want to know that the consumers of power are willing to put skin in the game," Parekh said in an interview. "Without Meta taking a more active voice in the need to expand the amount of power that's on the system, it's not happening as quickly as we would like."

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Want out of those new 'smart features'? We’ve got you covered

Google's "don't be evil" ethos is so 2015. These days, the Chocolate Factory is all about integrating users with bots, whether they like it or not. Now, it's rolling out Workspace "smart features" that process personal content with AI, and many users are finding the settings enabled by default.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is upgrading its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys for Windows 11, allowing you to use an on-device AI model to power some of its features. With the 0.96 update, you can route requests through Microsoft's Foundry Local tool or the open-source Ollama, both of which run AI models on your device's neural processing unit (NPU) instead of connecting to the cloud. That means you won't need to purchase API credits to perform certain actions, like having AI translate or summarize the text copied to your clipboard. Plus, you can keep your data on your device.

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Redesigned booster ruptures during early checks, delaying latest Starship iteration

SpaceX has responded to Blue Origin's announcement of a heftier version of its New Glenn rocket in the only way it knows how – by accidentally destroying a Starship booster.…