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H20 silicon under the microscope after slipping through US export bans

China's internet watchdog has hauled Nvidia in for a grilling over alleged backdoors in its H20 chips, the latest twist in the increasingly paranoid semiconductor spat between Washington and Beijing.…

Sony has filed a lawsuit in California court against Tencent, alleging the Chinese company's upcoming game Light of Motiram constitutes a "slavish clone" of Sony's Horizon series. The complaint details extensive similarities between the games, from post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur settings to red-haired female protagonists. Tencent had approached Sony for licensing deals in 2024, which Sony rejected twice.

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Trauma-inducing startup sound finally axed

Great news! Microsoft has finally squashed a Windows 11 Insider bug. No, it still hasn't "Made the Start Menu Great Again." No, you still can't drag the taskbar wherever you like. But yes, it simply kills the bug that played the Windows Vista boot chime on startup.…

Brit chip biz sees demand surge for turnkey compute subsystems, chiplets, and complete SoC designs

Chip designer Arm says it is looking to bring more compute subsystems, chiplets, and even end-to-end solutions to market as customers increasingly expect a more complete starting point for their custom silicon.…

Russia spying on foreign embassies? Say it ain't so

Russian cyberspies are abusing local internet service providers' networks to target foreign embassies in Moscow and collect intel from diplomats' devices, according to a Microsoft Threat Intelligence warning.…

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority concluded that Microsoft and Amazon hold "significant unilateral market power" in cloud services and recommended investigating both companies under new competition rules. The regulator said it had concerns about practices creating customer "lock-in" effects through egress fees and unfavorable licensing terms that trap businesses in difficult-to-exit contracts. Microsoft and Amazon each control roughly 30-40% of the infrastructure-as-a-service market, while Google holds 5-10%. Microsoft disputed the findings, calling the cloud market "dynamic and competitive." Amazon said the probe recommendations were "unwarranted."

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Beijing has summoned Nvidia over alleged security issues with its chips, in a blow to the US company's push to revive sales in the country after Washington granted approval for the export of a made-for-China chip. From a report: China's cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called "serious security issues" with the company's artificial intelligence chips. It said US AI experts had "revealed that Nvidia's computing chips have location tracking and can remotely shut down the technology." The Cyberspace Administration of China requested that Nvidia explain the security problems associated with the H20 chip, which was designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export restrictions, and submit documentation to support their case.

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US court docs reveal that infamous Chinese snoops filed IP papers like tax returns

Security researchers have uncovered more than a dozen patents for offensive cybersecurity tools filed by Chinese companies allegedly tied to Beijing's Silk Typhoon espionage crew.…

Microsoft has reached a $4 trillion market cap, becoming only the second company to achieve this milestone. Investors drove the stock up 4.62% following the company's fourth-quarter earnings report, which showed strong growth in cloud-computing services fueled by artificial intelligence demand. Microsoft's Azure cloud business generated $75 billion in annual revenue, representing a 34% increase from the previous fiscal year. Nvidia became the first company to reach the $4 trillion market cap earlier this month.

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Passwordless disk locking is coming, a couple of years later than hoped

Canonical's Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop has published a roadmap for the 25.10 release, which includes a feature that was originally planned for 23.10.…

A Nature survey of more than 1,100 physicists reveals fundamental disagreements about quantum mechanics' relationship to reality, despite the theory's century-long track record as one of science's most successful frameworks. The survey, conducted to mark quantum mechanics' 100th anniversary, found 36% of researchers favor the Copenhagen interpretation while 17% prefer epistemic approaches that treat quantum states as information rather than physical reality. Another 15% support the many-worlds interpretation. Researchers split evenly on whether a boundary exists between quantum and classical worlds -- 45% said yes, 45% said no. When asked about the wavefunction's nature, 47% called it a mathematical tool while 36% considered it a representation of physical reality. Only 24% of respondents expressed confidence their chosen interpretation was correct, with others viewing their preference as merely adequate or useful in certain circumstances. The survey contacted over 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, plus attendees of a centenary meeting on Heligoland island. Despite quantum mechanics enabling technologies from computer chips to medical imaging, physicists remain divided on the physical reality underlying the mathematics.

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Regulators around the globe pay attention as results of 21-month cloud probe published

Britain's competition regulator says Microsoft and AWS are using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers and proposes to designate both with strategic market status (SMS) to take action against them.…

Developers are growing increasingly frustrated with AI coding tools that produce deceptively flawed solutions, according to Stack Overflow's latest survey of over 49,000 programmers worldwide. The 2025 survey exposes a widening gap between AI adoption and satisfaction: while 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, their trust has cratered. Only 33% trust AI accuracy today, down from 43% last year. The core problem isn't broken code that developers can easily spot and discard. Instead, two-thirds report wrestling with AI solutions that appear correct but contain subtle errors requiring significant debugging time. Nearly half say fixing AI-generated code takes longer than expected, undermining the productivity gains these tools promise to deliver.

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Investors cash in as design firm goes public after takeover dreams dashed

Figma is offering 36,937,080 shares of Class A common stock at $33 apiece, in an initial public offering that values the web design tool developer at $19.3 billion.…

Government officials say they are monitoring the situation

A major supplier of healthcare equipment to the UK's National Health Service and local councils is on the verge of collapse 16 months after falling victim to cyber criminals.…

Crew-11 prepares for liftoff on Musk rocket while Boeing's Calamity Capsule remains grounded

The next International Space Station (ISS) crew is set to launch today, commanded by an astronaut who gave up her Crew-9 seat to make way for the Boeing Starliner test team.…

Startup’s workaround reuses stuck compute slots to rein in runaway function costs

Vercel claims it's slashed AWS Lambda costs by up to 95 percent by reusing idle instances that would otherwise rack up charges while waiting on slow external services like LLMs or databases.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge. The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last month to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site, the worst showing for a social media platform. "I'm calling time on it," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement highlighting that Australian children were being negatively affected by online platforms, and reminding social media of their social responsibility. "I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs." The decision broadens the ban set to take effect in December. YouTube says it is used by nearly three-quarters of Australians aged 13 to 15, and should not be classified as social media because its main activity is hosting videos. "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

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Deal for legacy applications support reaches £322M as they continue to be decommissioned

UK tax collector His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has awarded Capgemini a £107 million support and services deal, without competition, under a relationship that started more than twenty years ago.…

UK's Online Safety Act kicks off about as well as everyone expected

Analysis With the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA) now in effect, it was only a matter of time before tech-savvy under-18s figured out how to bypass the rules and regain access to adult content.…