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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Wednesday that current business leaders may be the last generation to manage an exclusively human workforce, as AI transforms the workplace. "We are really moving into a world now of managing humans and agents together," he told Axios. His company's Agentforce platform, launched in September, has taken over many customer support tasks, prompting plans to move support staff into sales roles. Speaking to Axios at the World Economic Forum, Benioff dismissed Microsoft's AI CoPilot as disappointing and promised to defend his employees against discrimination amid political debates over corporate diversity programs.

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Meanwhile, datacenter emissions continue to soar

Microsoft is forking out for even more carbon credits to offset spiralling AI-fuelled carbon dioxide emissions from its datacenters.…

Santee Cooper, the big power provider in South Carolina, has tapped financial advisers to look for buyers that can restart construction on a pair of nuclear reactors that were mothballed years ago. From a report: The state-owned utility is betting interest will be strong, with tech giants such as Amazon.com and Microsoft in need of clean energy to fuel data centers for artificial-intelligence capabilities. The details Santee Cooper announced Wednesday it is seeking proposals for buyers to complete the project at South Carolina's sprawling V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, confirming an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal. The utility is working with bankers at Centerview Partners, which will accept proposals until May 5. Santee Cooper will likely look to tap a consortium that could include a construction firm, a tech company that will use the power and an additional partner for capital, according to people familiar with the matter. It is also looking for another power company partner because it doesn't plan to own or operate the units once they are up and running.

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This year's model adds lots of AI, improved management, and support for biz buyers

First fondle Samsung has announced the Galaxy S25, the latest version of its flagship smartphone range, and, as you'd expect, made new AI features the hero.…

Search in Premiere Pro has been updated with AI-powered visual recognition, allowing users to find videos by describing the contents of the footage. From a report: It's just one of several quality-of-life features Adobe is adding to Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Frame.io that aim to save video editors time on their projects. Users can enter search terms like "a person skating with a lens flare" to find corresponding clips within their media library. Adobe says the media intelligence AI can automatically recognize "objects, locations, camera angles, and more," alongside spoken words -- providing there's a transcript attached to the video. The feature doesn't detect audio or identify specific people, but it can scrub through any metadata attached to video files, which allows it to fetch clips based on shoot dates, locations, and camera types. The media analysis runs on-device, so doesn't require an internet connection, and Adobe reiterates that users' video content isn't used to train any AI models.

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Microsoft will pay to restore parts of Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic forests [non-paywalled source] in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of carbon credits, becoming the latest Big Tech player to bet that nature-based solutions can offset an artificial intelligence-driven surge in greenhouse gas emissions. Financial Times: The $3.2tn US company told the Financial Times it had signed a deal to buy 3.5mn credits over 25 years from Re.green, a Brazilian start-up which buys up farming and cattle land. It restores the land by planting native tree species, in projects financed through carbon credits and timber sales. Neither company disclosed a value for the deal, but recent market analysis suggests it could be worth around $200mn. Microsoft's recent dealmaking has made it one of the biggest buyers of nature-based carbon removals globally. The deal comes as groups including Microsoft, Google and Amazon invest heavily in data centres to cope with the huge demand stemming from the growth of generative AI. But the buildout is leading to a surge in their energy usage and complicating their pledges to investors to curb emissions.

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Learning how to deal with the microorganisms hitching a ride with humans

Two NASA astronauts are set to venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) in search of signs of life.…

OpenAI will release "Operator" this week, letting ChatGPT users automate web tasks through a built-in browser, The Information reported Wednesday. The feature handles restaurant bookings, travel planning, shopping and deliveries, asking follow-up questions like party size for reservations. Users can watch Operator work, take control mid-task, and share workflows with others.

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Update addresses boot failures on multi-node systems

Microsoft is releasing an out-of-band patch to deal with a problem that prevented some Windows Server 2022 machines from booting.…

Streaming platform Plex has introduced public reviews and user profiles, expanding social features launched last October. Users can now comment on others' reviews and make their profiles, watchlists and viewing history searchable, with customizable privacy settings ranging from public to private. Plex Pass subscribers are additionally also gaining access to HEVC encoding for improved visual quality.

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Ross Ulbricht's family are now appealing for donations to support his reintegration into society

Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is now a free man after US President Donald Trump made good on his promise to issue a federal pardon upon taking office.…

Netflix will raise prices on most U.S. and Canadian subscription tiers after adding a record 19 million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2024, bringing its global total to 302 million users. The standard plan without ads will increase to $17.99 from $15.49, while its premium tier rises $2 to $24.99. The ad-supported tier will cost $7.99, up $1. The streaming service's quarterly revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, jumping 16%, while operating income rose 52% to $2.3 billion. The company credited recent successes including the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing match and "Squid Game" season two for the subscriber surge.

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But no changes to bcachefs

Linux kernel 6.13 is here, but don't get too excited. It's not a biggie and, given the timing, probably won't appear in many familiar distros.…

Alphabet's Google is backing AI developer Anthropic with a further $1 billion, building its stake in one of the most promising rivals to OpenAI. From a report: The new funding comes in addition to more than $2 billion that Google has already invested in Anthropic, according to a person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named discussing a private matter. Google has a business agreement with Anthropic that covers the use of a suite of online tools and services. Amazon counts among its biggest backers. San Francisco-based Anthropic is best known for its Claude family of large language models, which compete with OpenAI's GPT. Like its peers, the company has been raising significant sums to sustain investment in expanding its computing capabilities and keep pace in a race to advance AI. The new deal comes weeks after Bloomberg News reported that Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that would value the startup at $60 billion.

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Amazon doesn't break out figures, but then again neither do Microsoft nor Google

As more businesses shift an ever greater number of workloads to the cloud, hyperscalers aren't doing enough to help CIOs or tech buyers, who are already under legislative pressure, to be more transparent about their own corporation's carbon footprint regarding compute services.…

Cloudflare blocked 21.3 million DDoS attacks in 2024, including a record-breaking 5.6 terabit-per-second strike that targeted an Asian internet service provider last October. The yearly total marked a 53% increase from 2023. The 80-second October attack, which originated from over 13,000 compromised Internet of Things devices running Mirai malware variant, highlighted an alarming trend: hyper-volumetric attacks exceeding 1 terabit per second grew by 1,885% in the fourth quarter compared to the previous quarter. Ransom DDoS attacks, where criminals threatened organizations with service disruptions unless paid, rose 78% in the same period.

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Everyone agrees defense matters. How to do it is up for debate

Feature The Trump administration came to office this week without a detailed information security policy, but analysis of cabinet nominees’ public remarks and expert comments suggest it will make significant changes in the field.…

Cut off nearly 44k peeps who had been waiting 70 minutes for advice on unavoidable chore

The UK tax collector must "take responsibility for its own failings to offer sufficiently effective digital services to customers," according to a committee of MPs which accused HMRC of "deliberately" poor phone service to push callers online.…

Interim appointment after former head booted out for not being 'sufficiently focused on growth'

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has a new chair after the sudden departure of the previous incumbent.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: [Amber Case is a speaker and author of Calm Technology.] Case's book, inspired by the work of Xerox PARC researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, outlines eight principles for calm technology; examples include the idea that technology "should require the smallest possible amount of attention" while in use, and that it "should work even when it fails." The book's ideas gained the attention of major technology companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, and Case gave talks at TED and the Thinking Digital Conference, among others. "But that wasn't enough," says Case. While her ideas received plenty of interest, she noticed that interest didn't translate to concrete action. Companies designing new products were unclear on what was right, or wrong, and uncertain about how they might put calm technology ideals into practice. So, Case decided on a new approach. She founded the Calm Tech Institute in May 2024 to develop and promote a Calm Tech certification. "A standard is a good way of rewarding that behavior," says Case. The certification includes 81 points that span six categories: attention, periphery, durability, light, sound, and materials. Some of the certification's specifications are quite stringent. It outlines minimum standards for user interface (UI) design, such as consistent use of icons and font typography, asks that all but the "most crucial" notifications be turned off by default, and requires an instruction booklet with a list of replacements and compatible parts. The first handful of devices that earned the Calm Tech certification were announced at, or just before, CES 2025. This first batch included, for example, the reMarkable Paper Pro. Released on September 4, 2024, the Paper Pro looks like an iPad and has a color eInk display, but it's tightly focused on writing and organizing notes with the tablet's included stylus. ReMarkable purposefully constrains the device's features to maintain a distraction-free experience. Though it can sync notes online, the Paper Pro doesn't have an app store, a web browser, or widgets. It doesn't even display the time. [...] Another early adopter was Mui Labs, creator of the Mui Board, a smart home device that looks like a piece of finely finished decorative wood but, when touched, illuminates to reveal a smart home interface. [...] Several other devices earned certification in late 2024. These include the AirThings View Plus, an air quality monitor with a simple eInk display that I highlighted during the 2021 wildfire season; the Daylight Computer, a portable PC with an eInk display and custom OS meant to reduce distractions; and Unpluq, a physical dongle that can lock apps on Android and iOS devices until the dongle is moved close to the device. Calm Tech Institute's certification is not yet publicly available, though it does hope to have it published "soon," says Case. Spectrum notes that Calm is "also exploring research into calm technology and working with neuroscientists to study the 'cognitive need for dimensionality and texture' in user interfaces."

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