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Demotion of cyberspace policy team, closure of others, not a great look

The US State Department announced a major reorg this month, and the changes could weaken America's ability to counter China's growing technological influence.…

Huawei is gearing up to test its newest and most powerful AI processor, which the company hopes could replace some higher-end products of U.S. chip giant Nvidia. From a WSJ report: Huawei has approached some Chinese tech companies about testing the technical feasibility of the new chip, called the Ascend 910D, people familiar with the matter said. The company is slated to receive the first batch of samples of the processor as soon as late May, some of the people said. The development is still at an early stage, and a series of tests will be needed to assess the chip's performance and get it ready for customers, the people said. Huawei hopes that the latest iteration of its Ascend AI processors will be more powerful than Nvidia's H100, a popular chip used for AI training that was released in 2022, said one of the people. Previous versions are called 910B and 910C.

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Did we says offshore? We meant, er, hardcore. Amirite, DOGE bros?

Comment IBM – a company understood to employ at least one-third of its global workforce in India and Bangladesh – is pledging to spend $150 billion over the next half decade on making America great again.…

Researchers claiming affiliation with the University of Zurich secretly deployed AI-powered bots in a popular Reddit forum to test whether AI could change users' minds on contentious topics. The unauthorized experiment, which targeted the r/changemyview subreddit, involved bots making over 1,700 comments across several months while adopting fabricated identities including a sexual assault survivor, a Black man opposing Black Lives Matter, and a domestic violence shelter worker. The researchers "personalized" comments by analyzing users' posting histories to infer demographic information. The researchers, who remain anonymous despite inquiries, claimed their bots were "consistently well-received," garnering over 20,000 upvotes and 137 "deltas" -- awards indicating successful opinion changes. Hundreds of bot comments were deleted following the disclosure.

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The OS came first, the foundation later – so what does it do?

Interview Many FOSS projects are backed by nonprofit foundations. One such example is the FreeBSD Foundation, started by Meta software engineer Justin T Gibbs. He spoke with The Register about the project's copyright philosophy, what the foundation does, and why it matters.…

Inventor James Dyson described his career as "a life of failure" in a recent Wall Street Journal interview, citing setbacks as drivers of innovation. The 77-year-old creator of the bagless vacuum cleaner, who built a $16.8 billion fortune according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, created 5,127 prototypes over five years before successfully launching his signature product in 1993. "If something works, it's less challenging, it's less interesting," Dyson said. "If something's gone wrong, you want to know why it's gone wrong, and it's a learning process." Dyson's company abandoned its electric vehicle project in 2019 despite investing over $600 million, concluding it wasn't commercially viable. The prototype now sits prominently at the company's Singapore headquarters. "I had to be pragmatic about it and say it's too risky for us to do, which is a shame because I loved doing it," Dyson said.

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Damning report says it set a moving target that was way too ambitious

The European Chips Act is unlikely to meet its target of hitting a 20 percent share of the global semiconductor market by 2030.…

IBM announced plans to invest $150 billion in the United States over the next five years, with more than $30 billion earmarked specifically for research and development of mainframes and quantum computing technology. The investment follows similar commitments from tech giants including Apple and Nvidia -- each pledging approximately $500 billion -- in the wake of President Trump's election and tariff threats. "We have been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago," said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a statement. The company currently manufactures its mainframe systems in upstate New York and plans to continue designing and assembling quantum computers domestically. The announcement comes amid challenging circumstances for IBM, which recently saw 15 government contracts shelved under the Trump administration's cost-cutting initiatives. Further reading: IBM US Cuts May Run Deeper Than Feared - and the Jobs Are Heading To India; IBM Now Has More Employees In India Than In the US (2017).

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Cyberattack? Bad software update? International oopsie? The cause is unclear, but Iberia is dark

A massive power outage has left Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France without electricity, and the cause has yet to be identified.…

Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, makes a case for why Google shouldn't be forced to sell Chrome: First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn't some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they're supposed to do: rewarding the best. Besides, we have a million alternatives. Firefox still exists, so does Safari, so does the billion Chromium-based browsers like Brave and Edge. And we finally even have new engines on the way with the Ladybird browser. Look, Google's trillion-dollar business depends on a thriving web that can be searched by Google.com, that can be plastered in AdSense, and that now can feed the wisdom of AI. Thus, Google's incredible work to further the web isn't an act of charity, it's of economic self-interest, and that's why it works. Capitalism doesn't run on benevolence, but incentives. We want an 800-pound gorilla in the web's corner! Because Apple would love nothing better (despite the admirable work to keep up with Chrome by Team Safari) to see the web's capacity as an application platform diminished. As would every other owner of a proprietary application platform. Microsoft fought the web tooth and nail back in the 90s because they knew that a free, open application platform would undermine lock-in -- and it did!

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No more asterisks. Voice typing now reflects the true spirit of your rage

Customer feedback wins – Microsoft is adding a toggle to turn off the Windows 11 profanity filter.…

It took a 1 year+ probe, plenty of client calls for VeriSource to understand just how much of a yikes it has on its hands

Houston-based VeriSource Services' long-running probe into a February 2024 digital break-in shows the data of 4 million people – not just a few hundred thousand as it first claimed - was accessed by an "unknown actor".…

Widespread power outages were reported Monday in parts of Spain, Portugal and France, affecting critical infrastructure like airports and causing transportation disruptions. From a report: "The interruption was due to a problem in the European electricity grid," E-Redes, the national energy supplier of Portugal, said in a statement. In addition to Portugal, it said, "The blackout also affected regions of Spain and France, due to faults in very high voltage lines." E-Redes said that the outage was widespread across Spain, with outages in Catalonia, Andalusia, Aragon, Navarre, the Basque Country, Castile and Leon, Extremadura and Murcia. In France, the Portuguese energy supplier said, "the Basque Coast and the Burgundy region also experienced power cuts." Spain's national power company, Red Electricia, said in a post on X that it had restored some power in the north and south of the peninsula. The cause of the outages was not immediately clear. But the effects of the disruption were felt in cities across the region.

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Image board hints that rumors of a poorly maintained back end may be true

Clearweb cesspit 4chan is back up and running, but says the damage caused by a cyberattack earlier this month was "catastrophic."…

Sales of electric vehicles in America jumped 10.6% in the first three months of 2025 (compared to the same period in 2024), reports Bloomberg. And research provider BloombergNEF expects all of 2025 will see a 31.5% sales increase from 2024's sales in the U:S. — slightly above the global increase rate of 30%. (That's 22 million battery-powered vehicles around the world.) "EV adoption is cruising along in the U.S.," Bloomberg writes, with interest "spreading from early-adopters to mainstream consumers" tired of paying for gas and oil changes — and attracted by new products from familiar brands: Of the 63 or so fully electric cars and trucks on the U.S. market, one quarter weren't available a year ago. The product blitz includes the first EV offerings from Acura, Dodge and Jeep, second models from Mini and Porsche and two more battery-powered machines each from Cadillac and Volvo... Many of the new EVs are relatively affordable. Cox Automotive estimates the price spread between EVs broadly and internal combustion cars and trucks has shrunk to just $5,000. General Motors, meanwhile, plans to resurrect its Chevrolet Bolt later this year with a price point around $30,000...

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Government procurement process is very involved

Comment It's easy to miss £125 million ($166 million). It could happen to anyone. Take Paul Patterson, for example. In January 2024, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd emailed the UK government's commercial arm to confirm the Japanese tech services provider would pause bidding for public sector work after the Post Office Horizon scandal became public knowledge.…

Spend will come under scrutiny, but projects with good returns still likely to get backing, analyst says

The ripple effects of recent US tariffs could hit sectors well beyond those currently in the firing line, or so warns TechMarketView.…

Latest profit and loss accounts carry scars of ad spending exodus, but things improving. Maybe not everywhere though

In the months following Tesla CEO and Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, now rebranded to X, business collapsed in the UK, according to recently filed profit and loss accounts for the year ended December 31 2023.…

Think that next refresh is going to get better? The first step to freedom is admitting there's a problem

Opinion Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user – 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable.…

"A new study found that a gene recently recognized as a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease is actually a cause of it," announced the University of California, San Diego, "due to its previously unknown secondary function." "Researchers at the University of California San Diego used artificial intelligence to help both unravel this mystery of Alzheimer's disease and discover a potential treatment that obstructs the gene's moonlighting role." A team led by Sheng Zhong, a professor in the university's bioengineering department, had previously discovered a potential blood biomarker for early detection of Alzheimer's disease (called PHGDH). But now they've discovered a correlation: the more protein and RNA that it produces, the more advanced the disease. And after more research they ended up with "a therapeutic candidate with demonstrated efficacy that has the potential of being further developed into clinical tests..." That correlation has since been verified in multiple cohorts from different medical centers, according to Zhong... [T]he researchers established that PHGDH is indeed a causal gene to spontaneous Alzheimer's disease. In further support of that finding, the researchers determined — with the help of AI — that PHGDH plays a previously undiscovered role: it triggers a pathway that disrupts how cells in the brain turn genes on and off. And such a disturbance can cause issues, like the development of Alzheimer's disease.... With AI, they could visualize the three-dimensional structure of the PHGDH protein. Within that structure, they discovered that the protein has a substructure... Zhong said, "It really demanded modern AI to formulate the three-dimensional structure very precisely to make this discovery." After discovering the substructure, the team then demonstrated that with it, the protein can activate two critical target genes. That throws off the delicate balance, leading to several problems and eventually the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. In other words, PHGDH has a previously unknown role, independent of its enzymatic function, that through a novel pathway leads to spontaneous Alzheimer's disease... Now that the researchers uncovered the mechanism, they wanted to figure out how to intervene and thus possibly identify a therapeutic candidate, which could help target the disease.... Given that PHGDH is such an important enzyme, there are past studies on its possible inhibitors. One small molecule, known as NCT-503, stood out to the researchers because it is not quite effective at impeding PHGDH's enzymatic activity (the production of serine), which they did not want to change. NCT-503 is also able to penetrate the blood-brain-barrier, which is a desirable characteristic. They turned to AI again for three-dimensional visualization and modeling. They found that NCT-503 can access that DNA-binding substructure of PHGDH, thanks to a binding pocket. With more testing, they saw that NCT-503 does indeed inhibit PHGDH's regulatory role. When the researchers tested NCT-503 in two mouse models of Alzheimer's disease, they saw that it significantly alleviated Alzheimer's progression. The treated mice demonstrated substantial improvement in their memory and anxiety tests... The next steps will be to optimize the compound and subject it to FDA IND-enabling studies. The research team published their results on April 23 in the journal Cell.

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