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Flaw abused ''in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals'

Apple patched a zero-day vulnerability affecting every iOS version since 1.0, used in what the company calls an "extremely sophisticated attack" against targeted individuals.…

AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid. In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right."

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DRAM doubles, NAND jumps 70% as corporate buyers race the clock

Exploding memory prices are pushing corporate buyers to fast-track PC purchases before costs climb further.…

Anticipated summer launch is cutting it fine

NASA has ended most science operations on its Swift observatory to keep the spacecraft in orbit a little longer.…

Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make. Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn't the "primary beneficiary" of this entity and so didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet. Meta's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its report, EY said auditing Meta's decision "was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE's economic performance."

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Researchers say breaches link identity abuse, SaaS compromise, and ransomware into a cascading cycle

Cybercriminals are turning supply chain attacks into an industrial-scale operation, linking breaches, credential theft, and ransomware into a "self-reinforcing" ecosystem, researchers say.…

That's not a good idea

Open Source Policy Summit 2026 SUSE recommends that companies should run on FOSS – but an accidental revelation from a company exec, live on stage, reveals it doesn't practice what it preaches. It's not alone.…

Legal teeth sold separately

The UK government claims a new Telecoms Consumer Charter will stop customers being hit by unexpected bill increases and offer clearer pricing when signing up to deals.…

Whoever gets it will steer UK department's IT, AI strategy, and megabucks vendor deals

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is offering between £270,000 to £300,000 for a senior digital leader who will oversee more than £4.6 billion in spending and more than 3,000 specialist staff.…

Department for Education dropped £27,118. The rest, little to nothing

Most UK government departments have spent little or nothing with social media platform X since July 2024 following an unpublished 2023 evaluation by the Cabinet Office. But the Department for Education has bucked the trend, spending £27,118.…

Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world." Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales between 2022 and 2025. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday ahead of his anticipated February 24 sentencing in a Washington, D.C., federal court, the Justice Department asked the judge for nine years in prison, $35 million in restitution, and a maximum fine of $250,000. Prosecutors described the unnamed Russian buyer -- believed to be Operation Zero, which publicly claims to sell only to the Russian government -- as "one of the world's most nefarious exploit brokers." Williams chose it because, by his own admission, "he knew they paid the most." He also oversaw the wrongful firing of a subordinate who was blamed for the theft.

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Meanwhile, IP-stealing 'distillation attacks' on the rise

A Chinese government hacking group that has been sanctioned for targeting America's critical infrastructure used Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to auto-analyze vulnerabilities and plan cyberattacks against US organizations, the company says.…

Low-earth orbit broadband is a no-brainer for remote area connectivity, but a brain teaser for lawmakers and networkers

APRICOT 2026 Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia.…

Apple's long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting. The new Siri -- first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 -- struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and sometimes falls back on OpenAI's ChatGPT instead of Apple's own technology, the report said. Apple has instructed engineers to begin testing new Siri capabilities on iOS 26.5 instead, due in May, and internal builds of that update include a settings toggle labeled "preview" for the personal data features. A more ambitious chatbot-style Siri code-named Campo, powered by Google servers and a custom Gemini model, is in development for iOS 27 in September.

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Switchzilla is only getting a small slice of the AI boom, but sees a campus refresh wave cresting

Cisco has increased the prices for its hardware to cover the increased cost of memory and says the resulting bigger bills are not changing customers’ buying habits.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks. Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firms, citing concerns about catastrophic risks.

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Ring's Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted "Search Party," a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who left in 2023 and returned last year, has since moved to re-establish police partnerships and push more AI into Ring cameras. The company has also partnered with Flock, a surveillance firm used by thousands of police departments, and launched a beta feature called "Familiar Faces" that identifies known people at your door. Chris Gilliard, author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, called the ad "a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement." Further reading: No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare, EFF Says

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Businesses are embedding prompts that produce content they want you to read, not the stuff AI makes if left to its own devices

Amid its ongoing promotion of AI’s wonders, Microsoft has warned customers it has found many instances of a technique that manipulates the technology to produce biased advice.…

Compute it leases from Amazon, MIcrosoft, and Google... that's another story

Model-maker and SaaS-y AI outfit Anthropic has committed to covering any increases in energy prices paid by consumers caused by its power-hungry datacenters.…

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project's current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process "works very well" and delivers steady improvements, they admit it consumes significant time in testing, fixing, and shipping, potentially capping ambition. Mint's next release will be based on a new Ubuntu LTS, and the team says it is seriously interested in stretching the development window. The stated goal is to free up resources for more substantial development rather than constant release management. Whether this signals bigger technical changes or simply acknowledges bandwidth limits for a small team remains unclear, but it marks a notable rethink of one of desktop Linux's most consistent release rhythms.

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