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Only 13% are AI-ready; the rest are bolting it on and hoping for ROI

Contrary to popular belief, you can't succeed in business (or AI) without really trying. Many orgs are jumping on the AI bandwagon without the infrastructure they need to make it work or track results, Cisco says. Most haven't even defined what they want their AI agents to do.…

The Japanese government has made a formal request asking OpenAI to refrain from copyright infringement. The request came after Sora 2 began generating videos featuring copyrighted characters from anime and video games. Minoru Kiuchi spoke at the Cabinet Office press conference on Friday and described manga and anime as "irreplaceable treasures" that Japan boasts to the world. The request was made online by the Cabinet Office's Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters. Sora 2, which launched recently, generates twenty-second videos at 1080p resolution. Social media is getting filled with videos showing characters from One Piece, Demon Slayer, Pokemon and Mario. Digital Minister Masaaki Taira expressed hopes that OpenAI would comply voluntarily. He indicated that measures under Japan's AI Promotion Act may be invoked if the issue remains unresolved.

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And they swiped a limited amount of customers' config data

Security shop F5 today said "highly sophisticated nation-state" hackers broke into its network and stole BIG-IP source code, undisclosed vulnerability details, and customer configuration data belonging to a "small percentage" of its users.…

Vibe coding may have played a role in what took researchers months to fix

Developers of VS Code extensions are leaking sensitive secrets left, right and center, according to researchers who worked with Microsoft to combat an issue that could have led to some nasty supply chain attacks.…

Apple will increase investment in China, the company's CEO Tim Cook said during a meeting with the country's industry minister in Beijing on Wednesday, according to an official summary of their exchange. From a report: Many U.S. companies have become cautious about relations with China as the world's two biggest economies have clashed over trade tariffs and as U.S. President Donald Trump seeks to promote manufacture in the United States rather than elsewhere. But Cook told China's industry minister Li Lecheng the iPhone maker will keep investing in China, the Chinese ministry said, although the summary gave no details of the size of the projected investment.

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Several leading news organizations with access to Pentagon briefings have formally said they will not agree to a new defense department policy that requires them to pledge they will not obtain unauthorized material and restricts access to certain areas unless accompanied by an official. The Guardian: The policy, presented last month by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been widely criticized by media organizations asked to sign the pledge by Tuesday at 5pm or have 24 hours to turn in their press credentials. The move follows a shake-up in February in which long-credentialed media outlets were required to vacate assigned workspaces which was cast as an "annual media rotation program." A similar plan was presented at the White House where some briefing room spots were given to podcasters and other representatives of non-traditional media. On Monday, the Washington Post joined the New York Times, CNN, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Reuters, the Associated Press, NPR, HuffPost and trade publication Breaking Defense in saying it would not sign on to the agreement.

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Raymond Chen says the OS used green-screen overlays to fake video playback – with curious side effects

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has answered a lingering Windows question – why did video screenshots keep playing in Paint?…

Apple unveiled a new 14-inch MacBook Pro on Wednesday that features the company's M5 chip and represents what Apple describes as the next major advancement in AI performance for its Mac lineup. The laptop delivers up to 3.5 times faster AI performance than the M4 chip and up to six times faster performance than the M1 chip through a redesigned 10-core GPU architecture that incorporates a Neural Accelerator in each core. The improvements extend beyond AI processing to include graphics performance that runs up to 1.6 times faster than the previous generation and battery life that reaches up to 24 hours on a single charge. Apple also integrated faster storage technology that performs up to twice as fast as the prior generation and allows configurations up to 4TB. The 10-core CPU delivers up to 20% faster multithreaded performance compared to the M4. The laptop runs macOS Tahoe and includes a Liquid Retina XDR display available in a nano-texture option, a 12MP Center Stage camera, and a six-speaker sound system. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is available for pre-order starting Wednesday in space black and silver finishes and begins shipping October 22. The base model costs $1,599.

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Beijing's self-reliance push and US export limits hit orders

Europe's tech darling ASML has warned Chinese demand for its chipmaking kit will plummet next year, as Beijing doubles down on home-grown alternatives in response to Uncle Sam's export restrictions and trade war shenanigans.…

Downstream Linux projects line up behind the latest release

A month after Debian 13.1's release, some of the more visible downstream forks, including Raspberry Pi OS, have decided it's time to incorporate the latest version of the main OS into their builds.…

Second huge increase in six months sees some devs heading for the exit

Augment has updated its pricing model for Augment Code, an AI coding assistant, to be based on AI usage rather than message interactions. The company said its existing model "isn't sustainable" but users have calculated that the new one is more than ten times as expensive.…

Action alleges Redmond unfairly hikes costs for businesses running Windows Server outside Azure

The team pushing a £2 billion legal claim accusing Microsoft of overcharging businesses that use its software on rival clouds has called for further participants ahead of its first hearing in December.…

IDC and Counterpoint say premium kit is driving sales in both new and used markets

Premium devices are what smartphone buyers want right now, and it seems that applies equally to the latest devices and second-hand models destined for emerging markets.…

ICO makes example of outsourcing giant over sluggish cyber response

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued a £14 million ($18.6 million) penalty to outsourcing giant Capita following a catastrophic 2023 cyberattack that exposed the personal data of 6.6 million people.…

Germany's northernmost state bins Outlook – and tens of thousands of Redmond licenses

Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany, has finally concluded one element of a long-running project to eject Microsoft from its infrastructure by giving Exchange Server the boot.…

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched the LibrePhone Project, an initiative to create a fully free and open-source mobile operating system that eliminates proprietary firmware and binary blobs. From the FSF: "Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones. ... Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS." The project site can be found here.

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ESG kicked like a 'toxic political football' amid greenwashing

Canalys Forums 2025 US President Donald Trump released a wrecking ball that smashed through environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies stateside – and it's now swinging across the Atlantic, according to analysts.…

Think tank cautions that without job cuts or capital savings, the math doesn't add up

UK government's plans to save £45 billion through the application of AI in the public sector lack clarity and are based on broad-brush assumptions, Members of Parliament have heard.…

And which will crash, repeatedly, until users learn how to handle it safely

Column Steve Jobs probably didn't remember how many times he skinned his knees learning to ride a bike before describing a personal computer as a "bicycle for the mind." Jobs' point was that both tools help us to go further, faster, with just a little extra effort.…

A new study shows that common baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) can survive Mars-like conditions, including meteorite shock waves and toxic perchlorate salts found in Martian soil. Phys.org reports: Published in PNAS Nexus, Purusharth I. Rajyaguru and colleagues subjected Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is a widely used model yeast, to shock waves and perchlorates. The authors chose the yeast in part because it has already been studied in space. When stressed, yeast, humans, and many other organisms form ribonucleoprotein (RNP) condensates, structures made of RNA and proteins that protect RNA and affect the fates of mRNAs. When the stressor passes, the RNP condensates, which include subtypes known as stress granules and P-bodies, disassemble. The authors simulated Martian shock waves at the High-Intensity Shock Tube for Astrochemistry (HISTA) housed in the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India. Yeast exposed to 5.6 Mach intensity shock waves survived with slowed growth, as did yeast subjected to 100 mM sodium salt of perchlorate (NaClO4) -- a concentration similar to that in Martian soils. Yeast cells also survived exposure to the combined stress of shock waves and perchlorate stress. In both cases, the yeast assembled RNP condensates. Shock waves induced the assembly of stress granules and P-bodies; perchlorate caused yeast to make P-bodies but not stress granules. Mutants incapable of assembling RNP condensates were poor at surviving the Martian stress condition. Transcriptome analysis identified specific RNA transcripts perturbed by Mars-like conditions.

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