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Google parent Alphabet plans to spend $75 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, up from $52.5 billion last year, as it races to compete with Microsoft and Meta in AI infrastructure. CNBC: On its earnings call, Alphabet said it expects $16 billion to $18 billion of those expenses to come in the first quarter. Overall, the expenditures will go toward "technical infrastructure, primarily for servers, followed by data centers and networking," finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said. [...] Alphabet and its megacap tech rivals are rushing to build out their data centers with next-generation AI infrastructure, packed with Nvidia's graphics processing units, or GPUs. Last month, Meta said it plans to invest $60 billion to $65 billion this year as part of its AI push. Microsoft has committed to $80 billion in AI-related capital expenditures in its current fiscal year.

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International security squads all focus on stopping baddies busting in through routers, IoT kit etc

Netgear is advising customers to upgrade their firmware after it patched two critical vulnerabilities affecting multiple routers.…

A developer has successfully run the classic video game Doom on Apple's $50 Lightning to HDMI adapter, exploiting the device's built-in system-on-chip that runs a simplified iOS version.

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It looks like you want to irritate Windows users. Do you want some help with that?

There are some things that can't be unseen, including Microsoft posting a hand-drawn image of the company's infamous assistant, Clippy, on social media.…

Temperatures at the north pole soared more than 20C above average on Sunday, crossing the threshold for ice to melt. From a report: Temperatures north of Svalbard in Norway had already risen to 18C hotter than the 1991-2020 average on Saturday, according to models from weather agencies in Europe and the US, with actual temperatures close to ice's melting point of 0C. By Sunday, the temperature anomaly had risen to more than 20C. "This was a very extreme winter warming event," said Mika Rantanen, a scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. "Probably not the most extreme ever observed, but still at the upper edge of what can happen in the Arctic." Burning fossil fuels has heated the planet by about 1.3C since preindustrial times, but the poles are warming much faster as reflective sea ice melts. The increase in average temperatures has driven an increase in fiercely hot summers and unsettlingly mild winters.

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China's antitrust watchdog is laying the groundwork for a potential probe into Apple's policies and the fees it charges app developers, part of a broader push by Beijing that risks becoming another flashpoint in the country's trade war with the US. From a report: The State Administration for Market Regulation is examining Apple's policies, which include taking a cut of as much as 30% on in-app spending and barring external payment services and stores, people familiar with the matter said. Agency officials have spoken with Apple executives and app developers since last year, said the people, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive moves. The conversations stem from long-running disputes between Apple and developers such as Tencent and ByteDance over iOS store policies -- a source of tension between the US company and regulators worldwide. While Beijing has since 2024 targeted the practices of US tech firms from Nvidia to most recently Alphabet's Google, regulators may not formally move against Apple if the current conversations go well.

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Radiation-hardening for space environments and energy efficiency tweaks for above and below

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is leading a project to transform how chips are designed and manufactured, to make them more energy efficient and able to better tolerate environmental conditions such as radiation.…

Thailand cut power supply, fuel and internet to some border areas with Myanmar on Wednesday. It's an attempt to choke scam syndicates operating out of there that have become a growing security concern. Reuters: Scam compounds in Southeast Asia are suspected to have entrapped hundreds of thousands of people in illegal online and telecom operations, generating billions of dollars annually, according to a 2023 U.N. report. Thai Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul visited the Provincial Electricity Authority headquarters in Bangkok on Wednesday to oversee the effort to fight the crime rings. "They may turn to other sources of power supply or generate their own electricity. In the Thai Security Council orders, it also includes the halt in supplying oil and internet to them, which means that from now on any damage that occurs will have no connection to any resources in Thailand."

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Mountain View clocked onto the scheme with days to spare

A Chinese national faces a substantial stint in prison and heavy fines if found guilty of several additional charges related to economic espionage and theft of trade secrets at Google.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is "dead." A new analysis by Hansen and colleagues concludes that both the impact of recent cuts in sun-blocking shipping pollution, which has raised temperatures, and the sensitivity of the climate to increasing fossil fuels emissions are greater than thought. The group's results are at the high end of estimates from mainstream climate science but cannot be ruled out, independent experts said. If correct, they mean even worse extreme weather will come sooner and there is a greater risk of passing global tipping points, such as the collapse of the critical Atlantic ocean currents. Hansen, at Columbia University in the US, sounded the alarm to the general public about climate breakdown in testimony he gave to a UN congressional committee in 1988. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) defined a scenario which gives a 50% chance to keep warming under 2C -- that scenario is now impossible," he said. "The 2C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise." The new analysis said global heating is likely to reach 2C by 2045, unless solar geoengineering is deployed. [...] In the new study, published in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Hansen's team said: "Failure to be realistic in climate assessment and failure to call out the fecklessness of current policies to stem global warming is not helpful to young people." [...] Hansen said the point of no return could be avoided, based on the growing conviction of young people that they should follow the science. He called for a carbon fee and dividend policy, where all fossil fuels are taxed and the revenue returned to the public. "The basic problem is that the waste products of fossil fuels are still dumped in the air free of charge," he said. He also backed the rapid development of nuclear power. Hansen also supported research on cooling the Earth using controversial geoengineering techniques to block sunlight, which he prefers to call "purposeful global cooling." He said: "We do not recommend implementing climate interventions, but we suggest that young people not be prohibited from having knowledge of the potential and limitations of purposeful global cooling in their toolbox." Political change is needed to achieve all these measures, Hansen said: "Special interests have assumed far too much power in our political systems. In democratic countries the power should be with the voter, not with the people who have the money. That requires fixing some of our democracies, including the US."

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That's 1,750 positions about to join the employment queue and it's only February

Workday is erasing 8.5 percent of its personnel under a restructuring scheme because… AI.…

CU15 MIA as Redmond scrambles to fix issues

Microsoft has yet to deliver its promised Cumulative Update 15 for Exchange Server 2019 due to some issues, as the countdown to the end of support for the email platform continues.…

Techie complains as biz ignores contractual working hours

OnCall... even when I'm not Do you ever feel like you’re on-call even when you’re technically not on call?…

More Catastrophic Capsule than Calamity Capsule for Boeing's beancounters

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner project has added a reach-forward loss of $523 million for the aviation giant, taking total losses for the program beyond the $2 billion mark.…

Meta's metaverse ambitions face a decisive year in 2025, with Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth warning employees that the project could become either "a legendary misadventure" or prove visionary, Business Insider is reporting, citing an internal memo. Bosworth called for increased sales and user engagement for Meta's mixed reality products, noting the company plans to launch several AI-powered wearable devices. The tech giant's Reality Labs division, which develops virtual and augmented reality products, reported record revenue of $1.08 billion in the fourth quarter but posted its largest-ever quarterly loss of $4.97 billion. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff the company's AI-powered smart glasses, which sold over 1 million units in 2024, marked a "great start" but would not significantly impact the business. The Reality Labs unit has accumulated losses of approximately $60 billion since 2020.

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At $61 per device, doubling each year, security updates from November are going to add up quickly

Microsoft has quietly updated a support document on how the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10 will work and how much it will cost - and for some it might cause their stomach to churn.…

You'll upgrade that aging piece of kit and you'll like it

For the past three years, Microsoft documented a way to run Windows 11 on PCs that lack Trusted Platform Module 2.0 hardware - but that workaround has now disappeared from its help page.…

Big Red accused of stalling or derailing legal fight by challenging fraud claim

Oracle this week asked the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to partially dismiss a challenge to its JavaScript trademark.…

Scientists have demonstrated control over a newly theorized type of magnetism, known as altermagnetism, by manipulating nanoscale magnetic whirlpools in an ultra-thin wafer of manganese telluride. "Our experimental work has provided a bridge between theoretical concepts and real-life realization, which hopefully illuminates a path to developing altermagnetic materials for practical applications," says University of Nottingham physicist Oliver Amin, who led the research with PhD student Alfred Dal Din. From the report: Using a device that accelerates electrons to blinding speeds, a team led by researchers from the University of Nottingham showered an ultra-thin wafer of manganese telluride with X-rays of different polarizations, revealing changes on a nanometer scale reflecting magnetic activity unlike anything seen before. [...] More recently, a third configuration of particles in ferromagnetic materials was theorized. In what's referred to as altermagnetism, particles are arranged in a canceling fashion like antiferromagnetism, yet rotated just enough to allow for confined forces on a nanoscale -- not enough to pin a grocery list to your freezer, but with discrete properties that engineers are keen to manipulate into storing data or channeling energy. "Altermagnets consist of magnetic moments that point antiparallel to their neighbors," explains University of Nottingham physicist Peter Wadley. "However, each part of the crystal hosting these tiny moments is rotated with respect to its neighbors. This is like antiferromagnetism with a twist! But this subtle difference has huge ramifications." Experiments have since confirmed the existence of this in-between 'alter' magnetism. However, none had directly demonstrated it was possible to manipulate its tiny magnetic vortices in ways that might prove useful. Wadley and his colleagues demonstrated that a sheet of manganese telluride just a few nanometers thick could be distorted in ways that intentionally created distinct magnetic whirlpools on the wafer's surface. "Our experimental work has provided a bridge between theoretical concepts and real-life realization, which hopefully illuminates a path to developing altermagnetic materials for practical applications," says University of Nottingham physicist Oliver Amin. This research was published in the journal Nature.

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New home, Platform9, says it’s also helping a Fortune 500 company to migrate 40,000 VMs

Exclusive Rackspace is moving some of its back-office workloads off VMware and onto a platform called Private Cloud Director offered by cloud infrastructure outfit Platform9.…