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The next version of Windows will become "more ambient, pervasive, and multi-modal" as AI transforms how users interact with computers, Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davuluri said in a company video. Davuluri, Corporate Vice President and head of Windows, said that voice will emerge as a primary input method alongside keyboard and mouse, with the operating system gaining context awareness to understand screen content and user intent through natural language. Windows interfaces, he said, will appear fundamentally different within five years as the platform becomes increasingly agentic. The transformation will rely on both local processing power and cloud computing capabilities to deliver seamless experiences where users can speak to their computers while simultaneously typing or inking.

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Top fintech and crypto executives urged the Trump administration to block US banks from charging fees for access to customer data, levies that strike at the heart of their business models. From a report: Klarna, Robinhood and crypto exchange Gemini were among a long list of companies, investors and lobbying groups that signed a letter sent Wednesday to President Donald Trump, arguing that the proposed fees would "cripple" innovation and "may cause small businesses and financial tools to shut down entirely." JPMorgan Chase has told fintechs and the data aggregators they rely on that the bank's customer account information will no longer be accessible without a charge. JPMorgan, the biggest US bank, views the data aggregators as freeloaders of sorts who access data without paying and then charge their fintech clients for it. PNC Financial Services is considering charging similar fees. "We urge you to use the full power of your office and the broader administration to prevent the largest institutions from raising new barriers to financial freedom," they said in the letter. "We cannot allow the most powerful, entrenched banks to close the door on a more open and modern financial system."

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Making apps is as easy as selling t-shirts, claims vibe coding startup

Hands On Create has declared its vibe coding platform, now called Anything, production-ready at version 1.0, with support for both web and mobile applications – although our quick hands-on generated a host of errors.…

Brits wake to a beeping nightmare as Amazon’s AI assistant forgets how to set – or stop – alarms

Amazon's Alexa is on the fritz, bungling alarms and timers and leaving some UK users trapped in an endless wake-up call.…

BrianFagioli writes: Lenovo is starting its fiscal year with a major win, delivering record-breaking PC sales and claiming dominance in the AI PC space. For the first quarter of its 2025/26 fiscal year, the company reported $18.8 billion in revenue, which is 22 percent higher than the same period last year. Profit came in at $505 million, more than double the figure from a year ago. The standout performer was Lenovo's PC and smart devices division. It posted its fastest growth in 15 quarters and secured a record 24.6 percent global market share. More than 30 percent of Lenovo's PCs shipped in the quarter were AI PCs, giving it the top position in the Windows AI PC segment with a 31 percent market share. This leadership is an important talking point for Lenovo as it continues to market AI features as a key reason for buyers to upgrade.

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Moscow-linked miscreants accused of swiping sealed US court files and fiddling with a Norwegian dam’s floodgates

Russian attackers reportedly spent months rummaging through the US federal court's creaky case-management system, while Norway reckons the same Kremlin-friendly miscreants took control of a dam's controls – a transatlantic double-act in legal files and floodgates.…

Microsoft cap-ex larger than output of Uganda and Google trumps Slovenia... all in the name of AI

The level of investment pouring into new infrastructure from datacenter operators is comparable to the turnover of some mid-sized economies.…

Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI, has left the company to start Babuschkin Ventures, a VC firm focused on AI safety and humanity-advancing startups. TechCrunch reports: Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into one of Silicon Valley's leading AI model developers just a few years after it was founded. "Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023," Babuschkin wrote in the post. "I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed." Babuschkin is leaving xAI to launch his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, which he says will support AI safety research and back startups that "advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe." The xAI co-founder says he was inspired to start the firm after a dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, in which they discussed how AI systems could be built safely to encourage the flourishing of future generations. In his post, Babuschkin says his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in pursuit of a better life for their children. Prior to co-founding xAI, Babuschkin was part of a research team at Google DeepMind that pioneered AlphaStar in 2019, a breakthrough AI system that could defeat top-ranked players at the video game StarCraft. Babuschkin also worked as a researcher at OpenAI in the years before it released ChatGPT. In his post, Babuschkin details some of the challenges he and Musk faced in building up xAI. He notes that industry veterans called xAI's goal of building its Memphis, Tennessee supercomputer in just three months "impossible." [...] Nevertheless, Babuschkin says he's already looking back fondly on his time at xAI, and "feels like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college." "I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency," said Babuschkin.

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Nearly 100,000 records allegedly up for sale after apparent breach at booking system

Italy's digital agency (AGID) says a cybercriminal's claims concerning a spate of data thefts affecting various hotels across the country are genuine.…

WebSocket connections wrapped as streams, MAUI fixes and more as latest LTS version nears release candidate stage

Microsoft has released Preview 7 of its .NET 10 runtime and frameworks, with new features including wrapping WebSocket connections as streams, improved passkey authentication in ASP.NET, and new features and fixes for MAUI (Multi-platform App UI).…

Intruders accessed important systems but tells customers their data is safe

A UK-based multinational that provides tech stock availability tools is telling customers that its website outage is due to a cyber attack.…

Data brokers are required by California law to provide ways for consumers to request their data be deleted. But good luck finding them. From a report: More than 30 of the companies, which collect and sell consumers' personal information, hid their deletion instructions from Google, according to a review by The Markup and CalMatters of hundreds of broker websites. This creates one more obstacle for consumers who want to delete their data. Many of the pages containing the instructions, listed in an official state registry, use code to tell search engines to remove the page entirely from search results. Popular tools like Google and Bing respect the code by excluding pages when responding to users. Data brokers nationwide must register in California under the state's Consumer Privacy Act, which allows Californians to request that their information be removed, that it not be sold, or that they get access to it. After reviewing the websites of all 499 data brokers registered with the state, we found 35 had code to stop certain pages from showing up in searches.

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Social media marketeers getting better at concealing promos in posts

Boffins have peered deep into the eyes of social media users and come to the conclusion that they're not great at spotting when an influencer is trying to sell them something.…

Success does not guarantee succession

Opinion The Linux kernel is a remarkable creation. It has achieved a fundamental status in the industry, and thus the world, unmatched in scope, stability, and reputation. It powers lightbulbs to supercomputers, not to mention the billion-plus global army of Android. It covers a host of processors, a massive array of supported devices and an unparalleled choice of distributions.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: India's blueprint for displacing China as the world's electronics workshop contains a rather extraordinary feature: the entire Indian edifice requires Chinese companies to supply the technical architecture, manufacturing know-how and operational templates that would make such displacement theoretically possible. Let's start with Dixon Technologies, India's flagship domestic electronics manufacturer. The company has systematically built indigenous capability through a growing constellation of Chinese partnerships: Longcheer provides the design intelligence, Kunshan Q-Tech delivers camera module expertise, Chongqing Yuhai supplies precision-molded components and HKC brings display technology. This pattern of structured dependence has become the organizing principle of India's electronics manufacturing push. [...] The current architecture sees Chinese companies retain control of the critical knowledge while their Indian partners provide labour arbitrage and regulatory navigation. Under this arrangement, India isn't constructing an alternative to Chinese manufacturing so much as establishing Chinese manufacturing's most elaborate subsidiary operation, underwritten by Indian taxpayers and marketed as national renewal. Many countries, but most importantly India and Vietnam, have worked hard in recent years to attract businesses that decided to diversify away from China, a strategy analysts have dubbed as "China Plus One."

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Are UK taxpayers getting real value from SPA24 — or just high cost convenience?

Register debate series The UK government's five-year Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA24) with Microsoft is set to see public sector bodies spend around £1.9 billion each year—nearly £9 billion in total over half a decade. It's a vast sum for software and services, and one that deserves close scrutiny.…

Russian authorities are "partially" restricting calls in messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp, the latest step in an effort to tighten control over the internet. From a report: In a statement, government media and internet regulator Roskomnadzor justified the measure as necessary for fighting crime, saying that "according to law enforcement agencies and numerous appeals from citizens, foreign messengers Telegram and WhatsApp have become the main voice services used to deceive and extort money, and to involve Russian citizens in sabotage and terrorist activities."

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Meanwhile, the clock's ticking for the previous FOSS Redis

Redis 8.2 is FOSS again, albeit under a different license, and has multiple performance enhancements. Meanwhile, Redis 7.2, the last of the old FOSS versions, is nearing its end of life. New version, or new Valkey?…

Human usage set to double, AI agents might need them too

Analyst firm Gartner has declared hosted PCs are now often cheaper to operate than on-prem laptops, and two years away from being cost-effective for 95 percent of workers.…

$79 million is a small price to pay to keep China at bay

Australia will help to fund the development of two datacenters in the Pacific island nation Vanuatu, an example of tech infrastructure becoming an important diplomatic consideration.…