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Image fetches to be capped on hourly basis for Personal, unauthenticated use, paid-for plans get unlimited access

Docker has delayed its plan to limit image pulls – the downloading of container images – from Docker Hub, by one month and has altered previously published quotas.…

OpenAI has banned a group of Chinese accounts using ChatGPT to develop an AI-powered social media surveillance tool. Engadget reports: The campaign, which OpenAI calls Peer Review, saw the group prompt ChatGPT to generate sales pitches for a program those documents suggest was designed to monitor anti-Chinese sentiment on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The operation appears to have been particularly interested in spotting calls for protests against human rights violations in China, with the intent of sharing those insights with the country's authorities. "This network consisted of ChatGPT accounts that operated in a time pattern consistent with mainland Chinese business hours, prompted our models in Chinese, and used our tools with a volume and variety consistent with manual prompting, rather than automation," said OpenAI. "The operators used our models to proofread claims that their insights had been sent to Chinese embassies abroad, and to intelligence agents monitoring protests in countries including the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom." According to Ben Nimmo, a principal investigator with OpenAI, this was the first time the company had uncovered an AI tool of this kind. "Threat actors sometimes give us a glimpse of what they are doing in other parts of the internet because of the way they use our AI models," Nimmo told The New York Times. Much of the code for the surveillance tool appears to have been based on an open-source version of one of Meta's Llama models. The group also appears to have used ChatGPT to generate an end-of-year performance review where it claims to have written phishing emails on behalf of clients in China.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: On Saturday at the Silverstone Cafe in San Francisco, a smattering of activists gathered to discuss plans to stop the further advancement of artificial intelligence. The name of their non-violent civil resistance group, STOP AI, makes its mission clear. The organization wants to ban something that, by most accounts, doesn't yet exist -- artificial general intelligence, or AGI, defined by OpenAI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." STOP AI outlines a broader set of goals on its website. For example, "We want governments to force AI companies to shut down everything related to the creation of general-purpose AI models, destroy any existing general-purpose AI model, and permanently ban their development." In answer to the question "Does STOP AI want to ban all AI?", the group's answer is, "Not necessarily, just whatever is necessary to keep humanity alive." The group, which has held protests outside OpenAI's office and plans another outside the company's San Francisco HQ on February 22, has bold goal: rally support from 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, or 11 million people. That's the so-called "tipping point" needed for societal change, based on research by political scientist Erica Chenoweth. "The implications of artificial general intelligence are so immense and dangerous that we just don't want that to come about ever," said Finn van der Velde, an AI safety advocate and activist with a technical background in computer science and AI specifically. "So what that will practically mean is that we will probably need an international treaty where the governments across the board agree that we don't build AGI. And so that means disbanding companies like OpenAI that specifically have the goal to build AGI." It also means regulating compute power so that no one will be able to train an AGI model.

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After fifteeen years decade of big hype, less than 25% of orgs measure value of data, analytics

Fifteen years of big data hype, and guess what? Less than one in four of those in charge of analytics projects actually measure the value of the activity to the organization they work for.…

The General Services Administration (GSA) is shutting down its nationwide electric vehicle (EV) chargers, deeming them "not mission critical." The U.S. government agency also plans to offload newly purchased EVs, reversing initiatives from the Biden administration aimed at transitioning the federal vehicle fleet to electric. The Verge reports: The GSA currently operates several hundred EV chargers across the country, with approximately 8,000 plugs that are available for government-owned EVs as well as federal employees' personally owned vehicles. The official guidance instructing federal workers to begin the process of shutting down the chargers will be announced internally next week, according to a source with knowledge of the plans. Some regional offices have been told to start taking their chargers offline, according to an email viewed by The Verge. "As GSA has worked to align with the current administration, we have received direction that all GSA owned charging stations are not mission critical," the email reads. The GSA is working on the timing of canceling current network contracts that keep the EV chargers operational. Once those contracts are canceled, the stations will be taken out of service and "turned off at the breaker," the email reads. Other chargers will be turned off starting next week. "Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they're out of service," it concludes.

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According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI plans to shift most of its computing power from Microsoft to SoftBank-backed Stargate by 2030. TechCrunch reports: That represents a major shift away from Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest shareholder, who fulfills most of the startup's power needs today. The change won't happen overnight. OpenAI still plans to increase its spending on Microsoft-owned data centers in the next few years. During that time, OpenAI's overall costs are set to grow dramatically. The Information reports that OpenAI projects to burn $20 billion in cash during 2027, far more than the $5 billion it reportedly burned through in 2024. By 2030, OpenAI reportedly forecasts that its costs around running AI models, also known as inference, will outpace what the startup spends on training AI models.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Fourteen-year-old Aaryan Shukla cruised through six mental math calculation world records in a single day, according to a Guinness World Records statement published on February 12, earning the well-deserved nickname, "human calculator kid." Specifically, it took Shukla: - 30.9 seconds to mentally add 100 four-digit numbers - One minute and 9.68 seconds to mentally add 200 four-digit numbers - 18.71 seconds to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers - Five minutes and 42 seconds to mentally divide a 20-digit number by a ten-digit number ten times - 51.69 seconds to mentally multiply two five-digit numbers ten times - Two minutes and 35.41 seconds to mentally multiply two eight-digit numbers ten times According to the statement, these are among the most difficult mental calculation world records ever attempted. Shukla's frankly mind-boggling achievement also comes in the wake of another world record he broke in April 2024 at the age of 13: fastest time to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers. It took him just 25.19 seconds. That's an addition every half a second. I wouldn't be surprised if students seeking "shortcuts" in their math homework started phoning up Shukla instead of reaching for their ChatGPT browser tab. Guinness World Records published a video about Shukla's accomplishments on YouTube.

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Extremely Low Resource Optical Identifier no brighter than LED, but readable with telescopes

Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have come up with a cheap and simple way for satellites to be identified from the ground using lights to blink out an ID code.…

911 gets VIP treatment in 'one of the most congested and demanding environments for connectivity'

T-Mobile US has signed a deal to provide telecoms for emergency services in New York City using network slicing to their ensure calls and data traffic are prioritized above other users.…

Chinese startup DeepSeek will make its models' code publicly available, it said on Friday, doubling down on its commitment to open-source artificial intelligence. From a report: The company said in a post on social media platform X that it will open source 5 code repositories next week, describing the move as "small but sincere progress" that it will share "with full transparency." "These humble building blocks in our online service have been documented, deployed and battle-tested in production." the post said. DeepSeek rattled the global AI industry last month when it released its open-source R1 reasoning model, which rivaled Western systems in performance while being developed at a lower cost.

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HP has ended its controversial practice of imposing mandatory 15-minute wait times for customer support calls in several European countries, following internal pushback and customer complaints. The company confirmed the reversal and said it will "continue to prioritize timely access to live phone support."

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Plus: ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen not happy with SpaceX chief for 'lie' about 'abandoned' Starliner crew

SpaceX boss Elon Musk has called for the International Space Station (ISS) to be deorbited as soon as possible, perhaps by 2027.…

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has experienced $1.46 billion worth of "suspicious outflows," according to blockchain sleuth ZachXBT. From a report: The wallet in question appears to have sent 401,346 ETH ($1.1 billion) as well as several other iterations of staked ether (stETH) to a fresh wallet, which is now liquidating mETH and stETH on decentralized exchanges, etherscan shows. The wallet has sold around $200 million worth of stETH so far. Bybit CEO Ben Zhou wrote on X that a hacker "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."

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WinRAR 7.10 now lets users remove potentially sensitive metadata from downloaded files while preserving core Windows security features. The file compression tool's latest release introduces a "Zone value only" setting that strips download locations and IP addresses from Windows' Mark-of-the-Web security flags during file extraction. The new privacy control, enabled by default, maintains only the basic security zone identifier that triggers Windows' safety prompts for downloaded files. This change prevents recipients of shared archives from accessing metadata that could reveal where files originated. The update from win.rar GmbH, whose compression software claims 500 million users worldwide, also adds performance improvements through larger memory page support and introduces a dark mode interface.

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Apple is removing its most advanced, end-to-end encrypted security feature for cloud data in the United Kingdom [alternative source], in a stunning development after the government ordered the company to build a backdoor for accessing user data. From a report: The company said Friday that Advanced Data Protection, an optional feature that adds end-to-end encryption to a wide assortment of user data is no longer available in the UK for new users. This layer of security covers iCloud data storage, device backups, web bookmarks, voice memos, notes, photos, reminders and text message backups. "We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy," the company said in a statement. "ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices."

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It's Friday. Quit the doomscrolling. Distract yourself with IT infra news

Developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, ST Micro detailed a new photonic integrated circuit (PIC) on Thursday that it says will support pluggable optics capable of shuttling bits around the datacenter at up to 1.6 Tbps.…

AI coding assistants are reshaping software development, but they're unlikely to replace human programmers entirely, according to industry experts and developers. GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke projects AI could soon generate 80-90% of corporate code, transforming developers into "conductors of an AI-empowered orchestra" who guide and direct these systems. Current AI coding tools, including Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, are delivering 10-30% productivity gains in business environments. At KPMG, developers report saving 4.5 hours weekly using Copilot, while venture investment in AI coding assistants tripled to $1.6 billion in 2024. The tools are particularly effective at automating routine tasks like documentation generation and legacy code translation, according to KPMG AI expert Swami Chandrasekaran. They're also accelerating onboarding for new team members. Demand for junior developers remains soft, however, though analysts say it's premature to attribute this directly to AI adoption. Training programs like Per Scholas are already adapting, incorporating AI fundamentals alongside traditional programming basics to prepare developers for an increasingly AI-augmented workplace.

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Software engineering job listings have plummeted to a five-year low, with postings on Indeed dropping to 65% of January 2020 levels -- a steeper decline than any other tech-adjacent field. According to data from Indeed's job aggregator, software development positions are now at 3.5x fewer vacancies compared to their mid-2022 peak and 8% lower than a year ago. The decline appears driven by multiple factors including widespread adoption of AI coding tools -- with 75% of engineers reporting use of AI assistance -- and a broader tech industry recalibration after aggressive pandemic-era hiring. Notable tech companies like Salesforce are maintaining flat engineering headcount while reporting 30% productivity gains from AI tools, according to an analysis by software engineer Gergely Orosz. While the overall job market shows 10% growth since 2020, software development joins other tech-focused sectors in decline: marketing (-19%), hospitality (-18%), and banking/finance (-7%). Traditional sectors like construction (+25%), accounting (+24%), and electrical engineering (+20%) have grown significantly in the same period, he wrote. The trend extends beyond U.S. borders, with Canada showing nearly identical patterns. European markets and Australia demonstrate more resilience, though still below peak levels.

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Researchers say there's dissent in the ranks. Plus: An AI tool lets you have a go yourself at analysing the data

Hundreds of thousands of internal messages from the Black Basta ransomware gang were leaked by a Telegram user, prompting security researchers to bust out their best Russian translations post haste.…

It woz The Reg wot won it... or maybe just common sense prevailed among management

HP today abruptly ditched the mandatory 15-minute wait time that it imposed on customers dialling up its telephone-based support team due to "initial feedback."…