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Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to draw marketers with their extensive user base. Pinterest had 5,205 full-time employees as of September 2025. The latest job cut would translate to less than 780 positions. Top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies which were planning layoffs anyway. Last week, design software maker Autodesk also announced a 7% job cut to redirect investments to its cloud platform and AI efforts.

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Samsung said today that its Galaxy Z TriFold, the first tri-fold smartphone to ship in the U.S., will be available starting January 30 at a price point of $2,899 -- substantially more expensive than any other phone on the U.S. market, including Samsung's own $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7 and a fully loaded 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max. The company will only sell the device through its website and Samsung Experience Stores; mobile carrier partners including Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T won't be offering it directly. The TriFold unfolds into a 10-inch tablet, measures 3.9mm at its thinnest point, and is rated for 200,000 folds over its lifetime. Samsung launched the TriFold in South Korea on December 12 at 3.59 million won, about $2,450 at the time. Early reviews have praised the expansive inner screen for video but noted the 309-gram weight, thick folded dimensions, and half-baked software as significant drawbacks.

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Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called "Project Panama" to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies. The company spent tens of millions of dollars on the effort and hired Tom Turvey, a Google executive who had worked on the legally contested Google Books project two decades earlier. Anthropic bought books in batches of tens of thousands from retailers including Better World Books and World of Books. A vendor document noted the company was seeking to scan between 500,000 and two million books. Before Project Panama, Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann downloaded books from LibGen, a shadow library of pirated material, over 11 days in June 2021. He later shared a link to the Pirate Library Mirror site with colleagues, writing "this is awesome!!!" Meta employees similarly downloaded books from torrent platforms after approval from Mark Zuckerberg, court filings allege, though one engineer wrote that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right." Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion in August without admitting wrongdoing.

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GAO urges NWS to firm up its AI language plans as policy shifts slow multilingual warnings

US spending watchdogs have called on the National Weather Service (NWS) to deliver an updated plan for its AI language translation project to reduce the risk posed by extreme weather events to people not proficient in English.…

Communication attempts ongoing for stricken spacecraft

NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6.…

French govt says state-run service 'Visio' will be more secure. Now where have we heard that name before?

France has officially told Zoom, Teams, and the rest of the US videoconferencing herd to take a hike in favor of its own homegrown app.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft is testing a refresh of the Xbox Cloud Gaming web experience in public preview. "This preview is a first look at our new web interface on your browser and lets you try the updated design and product flow before it is rolled out broadly," Microsoft's Patrick Siu explains. "Players who opt in to this preview will see some changes to their experience including updated navigation features and a refreshed look and feel. As this is a preview, some functions may not yet be available or may behave differently than the current web experience. We will continue iterating during the preview period and changes may be made over time." [...] There's no real info about what's in the new experience, oddly. Microsoft notes only that it "lays the foundation for accelerating [their] ability to build new experiences for players," and that it "helps [them] validate the new web platform and refine the experience for everyone." The public preview can be found at xbox.com/play.

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Conclave doc outlines path to eternal releases

The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?…

RIKEN links up with Argonne, Fujitsu, and Nvidia to build next-gen infrastructure

Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu are working with America's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build and operate next-gen compute infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), in line with President Trump's Genesis Mission.…

Austrian education ministry unaware of tracking software until campaigners launched case

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on a school pupil's devices without consent, according to a ruling by the Austrian data protection authority (DSB).…

Victim and Big Brother Watch will argue the Met's policies are incompatible with human rights law

The High Court will hear from privacy campaigners this week who want to reshape the way the Metropolitan Police is allowed to use live facial recognition (LFR) tech.…

In space, no one can hear you bork

NASA has confirmed that its planet hunter, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), entered safe mode due to a command error that inadvertently left the spacecraft's solar arrays angled away from the Sun.…

Developer behind it is sick with worry he might have changed software development in nasty ways

Feature Open source developer Geoff Huntley wrote a script that sometimes makes him nauseous. That's becaues it uses agentic AI and coding assistants to create high-quality software at such tiny cost, he worries it will upend his profession.…

Another actively abused Office bug, another emergency patch – Office 2016 and 2019 users are left with registry tweaks instead of fixes.

Microsoft has issued an emergency Office patch after confirming a zero-day flaw is already being used in real world attacks.…

40 years later, mission boffin recalls being told to pronounce it correctly

It is 40 years since Voyager 2 performed the first and, so far, only flyby of the planet Uranus. The resulting trove of data, however, was a bonus that almost didn't happen.…

jeditobe writes: ReactOS, the open-source operating system aimed at binary compatibility with Windows, recently marked its 30th anniversary. Launched in 1996, ReactOS has focused on providing a free alternative to Windows, with compatibility for Windows applications and drivers. Though still in development, it has made significant progress in recent years, including improvements to USB support, better hardware compatibility, and enhanced performance with the release of version 0.4.15. The upcoming 0.4.16 release is set to introduce UEFI support, KMDF and WDDM graphics driver support, marking a major step forward in ReactOS's development.

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Analysts say today's capped deals may become tomorrow's cost shock

Gartner is warning Salesforce users that a capped enterprise agreement for its AI and data platforms will not be available when they come to renew, leaving a struggle to predict costs and understand value.…

A thoroughly modern piece of public transport infrastructure deserves a thoroughly modern bork

Bork!Bork!Bork! London's Elizabeth Line is the latest thing in urban development (at least as far as the UK is concerned). So it seems appropriate that its borks should be similarly up to date, and its emoticons rotated so the intent cannot be mistaken.…

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from PCMag: A lawsuit claims that WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is a sham, and is demanding damages, but the app's parent company, Meta, calls the claims "false and absurd." The lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco US district court on Friday and comes from a group of users based in countries such as Australia, Mexico, and South Africa, according to Bloomberg. As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed "courageous whistleblowers" who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user's messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app's end-to-end encryption. "A worker need only send a 'task' (i.e., request via Meta's internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job," the lawsuit claims. "The Meta engineering team will then grant access -- often without any scrutiny at all -- and the worker's workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user's messages based on the user's User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products." "Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users' messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required," the 51-page complaint adds. "The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated -- essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted." The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Telegraph: China hacked the mobile phones of senior officials in Downing Street for several years, The Telegraph can disclose. The spying operation is understood to have compromised senior members of the government, exposing their private communications to Beijing. State-sponsored hackers are known to have targeted the phones of some of the closest aides to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak between 2021 and 2024. It is unclear whether the hack included the mobile phones of the prime ministers themselves, but one source with knowledge of the breach said it went "right into the heart of Downing Street." Intelligence sources in the US indicated that the Chinese espionage operation, known as Salt Typhoon, was ongoing, raising the possibility that Sir Keir Starmer and his senior staff may also have been exposed. MI5 issued an "espionage alert" to Parliament in November about the threat of spying from the Chinese state. [...] The attack raises the possibility that Chinese spies could have read text messages or listened to calls involving senior members of the Government. Even if they were unable to eavesdrop on calls, hackers may have gained access to metadata, revealing who officials were in contact with and how frequently, as well as geolocation data showing their approximate whereabouts.

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