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AI firm promises HIPAA-compliant integrations as chatbot moves into hospital admin

Fresh from watching rival OpenAI stick its nose into patient records, Anthropic has decided now is the perfect moment to march Claude into US healthcare too, promising to fix medicine with yet more AI, APIs, and carefully-worded reassurances about privacy.…

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has threatened to withdraw free cybersecurity services from Italy's Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics and potentially exit the country after Italy's telecommunications regulator fined the company approximately 14 million euros for failing to comply with anti-piracy blocking orders. The penalty equals 1% of Cloudflare's global annual revenue but exceeds twice what the company earned from Italy in 2024. Prince called Italy's Autorita per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni a "quasi-judicial body" administering a "scheme to censor the Internet" on behalf of "a shadowy cabal of European media elites." The fine stems from Cloudflare's refusal to comply with Italy's Piracy Shield law, which requires internet service providers and DNS operators to block sites within 30 minutes of receiving blocking requests from copyright holders. Prince said Cloudflare may discontinue free services for Italian users, remove servers from Italian cities and cancel plans to build an Italian office.

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Sick astronaut back on Earth by Thursday, nature of ailment remains undisclosed

NASA astronaut Mike Fincke has handed command of the ISS to Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov as Fincke and the rest of Crew-11 are scheduled to head back to Earth on Wednesday.…

Streamer spend on content is set to top the $100 billion mark for the first time this year, according to an Ampere Analysis report. From a report: The landmark figure will be met as global streamers "remain the primary driver of growth in content investment," according to Ampere. Spend by the likes of Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV will shoot up 6% this year, helping lead to a 2% increase in overall global content spend, Ampere forecast. The $101 billion figure, the first time streamer spend has crossed that major $100 Billion landmark, will represent around two-fifths of the overall figure.

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Yes, you can get rid of it – assuming nobody's looked at it in 28 days

Microsoft's latest Windows Insider release introduces a policy allowing admins to remove the Copilot app from managed devices. But there's a catch - actually, several.…

Website built around buying and selling stolen data has lost control of its own

BreachForums, the serially resurrected cybercrime marketplace, has tripped over itself after a data breach spilled details tied to about 324,000 user accounts.…

Venezuela today, Taiwan tomorrow? This might be the last good year for buying hardware

Opinion For a world economy driven by consumerism, it's become markedly unkind to consumers. This goes double – literally – for digital tech, where memory prices have increased by between 100 and 250 percent in six months. If you think GPUs are pricey now, you'll only have to wait six weeks, during which both AMD and Nvidia are expected to demonstrate supply-side economics much as the Road Runner demonstrated gravity to Wile E Coyote.…

A year ago the Steam Survey showed a 2.29% marketshare for Linux. Last May it reached 2.69%, its highest level since 2018. November saw another all-time high of 3.2%. But December brought a surprise, reports Phoronix: Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%, a 0.01% dip from November. But now the December results have been revised... [and] put the Linux marketshare at 3.58%, a 0.38% increase over November. Valve didn't publish any explanation for the revision but occasionally they do put out monthly revised data. This is easily an all-time high... both in percentage terms and surely in absolute terms too.

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Tech minister Liz Kendall says the government will back a robust regulatory response

Ofcom is investigating X over potential violations of the Online Safety Act, Britian's comms watchdog has confirmed.…

A late operating system, a stopgap deal, and the accident that made DOS dominant

A blog post by programmer Nemanja Trifunovic, The Late Arrival of 16-bit CP/M, is on the face of it an interesting little excursion into the late delivery of a long-forgotten bit of software – one that turned out to be pivotal for the entire computer industry.…

'Unsupported' doesn't mean 'unused'

Bork!Bork!Bork! It isn't only a computer's software underbelly exposed during a bork. Sometimes the poor thing's innards are on show as engineers attempt to wring a little more life from long-expired systems.…

Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch pitches age limits and classroom curbs as fixes for behavior and mental health

The Tories have pledged to kick under-16s off social media, betting that banning teens from TikTok and Instagram will fix what they see as a growing crisis in kids' mental health and classroom behavior.…

A busy year of end-of-support dates awaits unwary admins

2026 has begun with the familiar sound of Microsoft's software Grim Reaper sharpening a blade as administrators peer glumly at the calendar of carnage ahead.…

Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia — two weeks after 74% of its staff voted to unionize. This means laying off the 71 people at the studio, reports the gaming news site Aftermath: [Communications Workers of America's Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada] said in a statement to Aftermath the union will "pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way." The union said in a news release that it's illegal in Canada for companies to close businesses because of unionization. That's not necessarily what happened here, according to the news release, but the union is "demanding information from Ubisoft about the reason for the sudden decision to close." "We will be looking for Ubisoft to show us that this had nothing to do with the employees joining a union," former Ubisoft Halifax programmer and bargaining committee member Jon Huffman said in a statement. "The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love video games made in Canada, deserve nothing less...." Before joining Ubisoft, the studio was best known for its work on the Rocksmith franchise; under Ubisoft, it focused squarely on mobile games. Ubisoft Halifax was quickly removed from the Ubisoft website on Wednesday...

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UPSes don’t work without power, or well-designed electricals

Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another instalment of “Who, Me?” - the weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of what not to do at work, and how to get away with it.…

Labels Rome's comms regulator ‘a quasi-judicial body’ that works on behalf of ‘shadowy, European media cabal’

Cloudflare’s CEO has threatened to pull the company out of Italy, and to withdraw free services it intends to provide to the Winter Olympic games, after the nation’s communications regulator slugged it with a fine equal to one percent of its annual revenue for violating anti-piracy regulations.…

An anonymous reader shared this report from It's FOSS: Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 years, with the average possibly skewed by "outliers" discovered after years of hiding.] The longest-lived bug, a buffer overflow in networking code, went unnoticed for 20.7 years! [But 86.5% of bugs are found within five years.] The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basically, when a commit fixes a bug, it includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug. Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commits, extracts the referenced commit hash, pulls dates from both commits, and calculates the time frame. As for the dataset, it includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3, covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these, 119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authors, and only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned. It took six hours to assemble the dataset, according to the blog post, which concludes that the percentage of bugs found within one year has improved dramatically, from 0% in 2010 to 69% by 2022. The blog post says this can likely be attributed to: The Syzkaller fuzzer (released in 2015) Dynamic memory error detectors like KASAN, KMSAN, KCSAN sanitizers Better static analysis More contributors reviewing code But "We're simultaneously catching new bugs faster AND slowly working through ~5,400 ancient bugs that have been hiding for over 5 years." They've also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerability, claiming that of all actual bug-introducing commits, it catches 92.2%. "The goal isn't to replace human reviewers but to point them at the 10% of commits most likely to be problematic, so they can focus attention where it matters..."

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Says ongoing talks about security are about understanding best practice, not strong-arming vendors

India’s government has denied that it is working on rules that would require smartphone manufacturers to provide access to their source code.…

Bloomberg reports on Amazon listings "automatically generated by an experimental AI tool" for stores that don't sell on Amazon. Bloomberg notes that the listings "didn't always correspond to the correct product", leaving the stores to handle the complaints from angry customers: Between the Christmas and New Year holidays, small shop owners and artisans who had found their products listed on Amazon took to social media to compare notes and warn their peers... In interviews, six small shop owners said they found themselves unwittingly selling their products on Amazon's digital marketplace. Some, especially those who deliberately avoided Amazon, said they should have been asked for their consent. Others said it was ironic that Amazon was scouring the web for products with AI tools despite suing Perplexity AI Inc.for using similar technology to buy products on Amazon... Some retailers say the listings displayed the wrong product image or mistakenly showed wholesale pricing. Users of Shopify Inc.'s e-commerce tools said the system flagged Amazon's automated purchases as potentially fraudulent... In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said sellers are free to opt out. Two Amazon initiatives — Shop Direct, which links out to make purchases on other retailers' sites, and Buy For Me, which duplicates listings and handles purchases without leaving Amazon — "are programs we're testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon's store, while helping businessesâreach new customers and drive incremental sales," she said in an emailed statement. "We have received positive feedback on these programs." Tagay didn't say why the sellers were enrolled without notifying them. She added that the Buy For Me selection features more than 500,000 items, up from about 65,000 at launch in April. The article includes quotes from the owners of affected businesses. A one-person company complained that "If suddenly there were 100 orders, I couldn't necessarily manage. When someone takes your proprietary, copyrighted works, I should be asked about that. This is my business. It's not their business." One business owner said "I just don't want my products on there... It's like if Airbnb showed up and tried to put your house on the market without your permission." One business owner complained "When things started to go wrong, there was no system set up by Amazon to resolve it. It's just 'We set this up for you, you should be grateful, you fix it.'" One Amazon representative even suggested they try opening a $39-a-month Amazon seller account.

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PLUS: Cambodia arrests alleged scam camp boss; Baidu spins out chip biz; Panasonic’s noodle shop plan; And more!

Asia in Brief The governments of Malaysia and Indonesia have suspended access to social network X, on grounds that it allows users to produce sexual imagery without users’ consent.…