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While Thunderbird 148 improves MS Exchange support and sign-on security

It's not the only new feature in Firefox 148 yet one thing is very definitely the big news: the global off switch for its AI features that the company announced earlier this month is now included.…

Research points to skills gaps and weak oversight as barriers to return on investment

Just 4 percent of businesses achieved a return on their AI investments, yet rather than admit AI isn't living up to early expectations, a newly published study is blaming the users for not doing enough.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation's electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app. The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserving a four-wheeled Uber. In the app, after entering your destination, Uber Air will appear as an option for eligible routes. The Uber app will book a flight and an Uber Black to pick you up and drop you off at a Joby "vertiport." Joby's air taxis, built exclusively for city travel, can accommodate up to four passengers and luggage. (Uber says size and weight guidelines will be announced closer to launch.) The interior is about the size of an SUV and has "comfortable seating" with panoramic windows. They can travel up to 200 mph and have a range of up to 100 miles. Four battery packs and a triple-redundant flight computer are onboard for safety purposes.

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Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry's most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy -- a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. "We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments ... if competitors are blazing ahead," chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME. The overhauled policy, approved unanimously by CEO Dario Amodei and Anthropic's board, instead commits the company to matching or surpassing competitors' safety efforts and to delaying development only if Anthropic considers itself to be leading the AI race and believes catastrophic risks are significant. The company also plans to publish detailed "Risk Reports" every three to six months and release "Frontier Safety Roadmaps" laying out future safety goals. Chris Painter, director of policy at the AI evaluation nonprofit METR, who reviewed an early draft, told TIME the shift signals that Anthropic "believes it needs to shift into triage mode with its safety plans, because methods to assess and mitigate risk are not keeping up with the pace of capabilities."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Trenchant manager profited millions from cyber tools reserved for the US

The former general manager of L3Harris's cyber arm will spend the next seven years behind bars for selling trade secrets to Russia.…

Orbit decay accelerates as solar activity rises, with no approved mission yet to raise the telescope's altitude

A newly released plot of the Hubble Space Telescope's altitude shows just how quickly the observatory has descended in recent years.…

As transatlantic tensions rattle nerves, Microsoft offers a digital bunker to the sufficiently paranoid

Azure Local can now run fully disconnected with no cloud connectivity, Microsoft confirmed at the London leg of its AI tour.…

Security pros question assurances as company offers staff credit monitoring

Wynn Resorts has confirmed that employee data was stolen from its servers, and is taking the hackers' word that they've since deleted it.…

It's not chatbot psychosis, it's 'math and engineering and neuroscience'

The latest project to start talking about using LLMs to assist in development is experimental Linux copy-on-write file system bcachefs.…

Overhauling immigration system a 'significant change for millions of travelers,' government admits

Many British citizens who hold another nationality are being barred from entering the UK unless they have a British passport or a £589 certificate as a result of the Home Office's efforts to digitize travel documents.…

HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM's contribution will rise through the year. From a report: Speaking on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreements for the year and also "qualified new suppliers [and] built in strategic inventory positions for key platforms and cut the time to qualify new material in half to accelerate our product configuration changes." That sounds a lot like HP Inc is signing up new suppliers at a brisk pace. Broussard said the company has also "expanded lower-cost sourcing across our commodity basket, lowering logistics costs with agile end-to-end planning processes." The company is using its internal AI initiatives to power those new processes. The company is also "configuring our products and shaping demand to align the supply we have with our customer needs" and "taking targeted pricing actions to offset the remaining cost impact in close partnership with both our channel and direct customers."

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Galaxy S25 sheds 63% in 12 months as reseller questions LLM emphasis

Smartphone makers love touting AI, but the technology may be quietly destroying resale values.…

Agency that can't keep bots out of its booking system more than doubles size of services agreement

The Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency has more than doubled the maximum offer on the table for a new online theory test service to £700 million.…

Note to secret agents: ChatGPT is NOT a private diary

A ChatGPT user with links to Chinese law enforcement tried to use the AI chatbot to run smear campaigns targeting the Japanese prime minister and other critics of the Chinese Communist Party, according to OpenAI's latest report on malicious uses of its models.…

Dude, where's my operating system?

Bork!Bork!Bork! Airports and computers remain uneasy travel companions. At London Gatwick, the inter-terminal shuttle briefly demonstrated why, with one information screen declaring: "Operating System not found."…

Apple's forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models -- the company's first-ever laptops to support touch input -- will feature the iPhone's Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans. The 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, are slated for release toward the end of 2026 and won't be part of Apple's product announcements in the first week of March. The redesigned interface brings up a contextual menu surrounding a user's finger when they touch a button or control, and enlarges menu bar items when tapped, adapting the available controls based on whether the input is touch or click. Apple does not plan to position the machines as iPad replacements or describe them as touch-first; the physical design retains the full keyboard and large trackpad of the current MacBook Pro. Last year's Liquid Glass redesign in macOS Tahoe, which added more padding around icons and touch-optimized sliders in the control center, was partly groundwork for this shift.

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And they're being stressed by geopolitical concerns that threaten to slow important data-sharing efforts

Researchers from Georgia Tech have found that the supply chain for threat intelligence data is susceptible to adversarial action, and proposed a method to improve data sharing that they think will make it stronger.…

Speeds up qualification of new suppliers to get more cheap parts into PCs, faster

HP Inc. has revealed that memory now accounts for 35 percent of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18 percent last quarter. And the company expects RAM’s contribution will rise through the year.…

The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill. The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year's new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects. In Texas, solar met more than 15% of electricity demand throughout the summer and beat out coal for the first time, and the SEIA report predicts the state will overtake California this year in total deployed storage. Supply chain restrictions reinforced by the bill and project cancellations could slow the pipeline this year, the report cautions.

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Analyst firm bemoans ‘peak insanity’ among those who think circling servers can replace down-to-earth server farms

Analyst firm Gartner thinks talk of placing datacenters in space has reached “peak insanity,” because orbiting facilities can’t be run economically or satisfy demand for compute power on Earth.…