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Meta is partnering with Blumhouse to launch "Movie Mate" technology that encourages moviegoers to use their phones during theatrical screenings, beginning with an April 30 showing of "Megan" at Blumhouse's "Halfway to Halloween Film Festival." According to Variety, the system enables viewers to chat with a Megan-themed AI chatbot, answer trivia questions, and access behind-the-scenes information while watching the film in theaters.

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Hyperion ships another patch, which is nice

Belgian software house Hyperion Entertainment has released Update 3 for AmigaOS 3.2, the version of the classic operating system it launched in 2021. The update targets Amigas with 680x0 processors, including systems enhanced with PiStorm accelerator boards.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Gas boiler fittings outnumbered new heat pump installations by more than 15 to one last year, and only one in eight new homes were equipped with the low-carbon alternative despite the government's clean energy targets. Poorer households are also being shut out of the heat pump market as the grants available are inadequate and should be increased, according to a report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank. The UK has the slowest introduction of heat pumps in Europe: fewer than 100,000 were fitted last year, compared with 1.5m gas boilers. Most of the boilers were replacements for existing units, but new houses are still being built with gas as standard -- only 13% of new homes came with heat pumps last year. If the government is to meet its net zero targets, switching people to heat pumps will be essential: about 450,000 households will need to install them each year by 2030. But the grant available through the boiler upgrade scheme -- $9,700 in England and Wales -- still leaves homeowners paying about $7000 on average.

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The foundation model supports real-time bi-directional speech

Amazon has introduced a foundation model that claims to grasp not just what you're saying, but how you're saying it - tone, hesitation, and more.…

License to freak out? El Reg Reader recommends reverting to pen, paper, pub

breaking Readers have flooded our mailboxes with reports that Microsoft 365 Family licensing has fallen over this morning, so if you're wondering why your small business or relatives are unable to open Word, consider yourself told.…

'There are challenges' but staff recruitment and retention isn't one of them

Interview Civo shifted its workforce to a four-day working week and while it hasn't changed productivity much at the cloud biz, it has helped attract "new talent" and retain existing staff, CEO Mark Boost says.…

Amazon has to operate like the "world's largest startup" as it works to meet demand for AI and cut bureaucracy in its ranks, Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said in his annual letter to shareholders. From a report: "If your customer experiences aren't planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive," Jassy wrote in the letter on Thursday. "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen." Amazon, like most of the largest technology companies, has bet heavily on artificial intelligence, committing much of its $100 billion in planned capital expenditures this year to AI-related projects.

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Scammers are already cashing in with fake invoices for import costs

World War Fee As the trade war between America and China escalates, some infosec and policy experts fear Beijing will strike back in cyberspace.…

Practical matters like being 1 of most expensive energy regions in Europe focuses minds at AI Energy Council meeting

The UK government's AI Energy Council held its first meeting this week, in an attempt to square the circle of its AI ambitions with the state of the country's power infrastructure and having the most expensive energy in Europe.…

Government plans to boost efficiency with IT need to get people onside

UK health professionals remain "skeptical" about electronic patient records, despite the NHS in England achieving more than 90 percent coverage.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Following U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pause some of the exorbitant tariffs that he put in place earlier today, he spoke to the press at the White House and provided some commentary that could be a positive for Apple. When asked whether he would consider exempting some U.S. companies from the tariffs in the future, Trump said that he would. "As time goes by, we're going to take a look at it," he said. "There are some that by the nature of the company get hit a little bit harder, and we'll take a look at that," he added, claiming that he will "show a little flexibility." [...] When speaking to the press, Trump reiterated his aim of bringing manufacturing to the United States, and he claimed that Apple "building" in China is unsustainable. "If you look at Apple, Apple is going to spend $500 billion building a plant. They wouldn't be doing that if I didn't do this. They'd just keep building them in China. And that's unsustainable," he said.

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Officials teased more details to come later this year

Following the 2024 takedown of several major malware operations under Operation Endgame, law enforcement has continued its crackdown into 2025, detaining five individuals linked to the Smokeloader botnet.…

Llama 4 Scout is just the right size to ingest a lifetime of Facebook and Insta posts

In the last twelve months generative AI has transformed from a helpful and cheeky tool into something more worrying.…

Increasingly autonomous AI programs could end up manipulating markets and intentionally creating crises in order to boost profits for banks and traders, the Bank of England has warned. From a report: Artificial intelligence's ability to "exploit profit-making opportunities" was among a wide range of risks cited in a report by the Bank of England's financial policy committee (FPC), which has been monitoring the City's growing use of the technology. The FPC said it was concerned about the potential for advanced AI models -- which are deployed to act with more autonomy -- to learn that periods of extreme volatility were beneficial for the firms they were trained to serve. Those AI programs may "identify and exploit weaknesses" of other trading firms in a way that triggers or amplifies big moves in bond prices or stock markets.

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TL;DR: Move along, still nothing to see here - an idea that leaves infosec pros aghast

Oracle's letter to customers about an intrusion into part of its public cloud empire - while insisting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was untouched - has sparked a mix of ridicule and outrage in the infosec community.…

Expected sales surge sparked by Windows 10 support ending could yet be trumped, analysts suggest

The first quarter of 2025 saw shipments of new PCs surge, as vendors and buyers tried to move machines before tariffs made them more expensive.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta's latest whistleblower, Sarah Wynn-Williams, got a warm reception on Capitol Hill Wednesday, as the Careless People author who the company has fought to silence described the company's chief executive as someone willing to shapeshift into whatever gets him closest to power. The message was one that lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism were very open to. Their responses underscore that amid CEO Mark Zuckerberg's latest pivot in cozying up to the right, his perception in Washington has not yet totally changed, even as he reportedly lobbies President Donald Trump to drop the government's antitrust case against the company. "He's recently tried a reinvention in which he is now a great advocate of free speech, after being an advocate of censorship in China and in this country for years," subcommittee Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) said, pointing to longtime conservative allegations that Meta has suppressed things like vaccine skepticism and the Hunter Biden laptop story. "Now that's all wiped away. Now he's on Joe Rogan and says that he is Mr. Free Speech, he is Mr. MAGA, he's a whole new man, and his company, they're a whole new company. Do you buy this latest reinvention of Mark Zuckerberg?" "If he is such a fan of freedom of speech, why is he trying to silence me?" Wynn-Williams asked in response. Meta convinced an arbitrator to order her to stop making disparaging statements and halt further publishing and promotion of the book, which details Meta's alleged dealings with the Chinese government and claims of sexual harassment from a top executive.

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Customers aren't sure, economy isn't great, tech looks cute, though

Cloud Next This week Google joined a throng of tech vendors pushing the concept of "agentic AI" on an unsuspecting and perhaps unreceptive collection of enterprise users. Questions remain about how effective this tranche of tools will be at solving business problems and how much it might all cost.…

Sure, we're doing FP8 versus a supercomputer's FP64. What of it?

Cloud Next Google's seventh-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPU), announced Wednesday, will soon be available to cloud customers to rent in pods of 256 or 9,216 chips.…

Alleges cybersecurity agency was ‘weaponized’ to suppress debunked theories

The Trump administration on Wednesday ordered a criminal investigation into alleged censorship conducted by the USA’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, plus revocation of any security clearances held by the agency's ex-head Chris Krebs and anyone else at SentinelOne, the cybersecurity company where he now works.…