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Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok, writing in a blog post There are fewer public companies to invest in, and firms that decide to do an IPO are getting older and older. In 1999, the median age of IPOs was five years. In 2022, it was eight years, and today, the median age of IPOs has increased to 14 years. The rise in the age of companies going public is not only a result of the Fed raising interest rates in 2022, but also the consequence of more companies wanting to stay private for longer to avoid the burdens of being public. Combined with the domination of passive investing, failure of active managers and high correlation in public markets, and high concentration in a few stocks, the reality is that there is no alpha left in public markets.

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Analyst bets smart money on 'proactive digital companion' upgrade cycle

Generative AI will supposedly spark a smartphone renaissance, driving both unit shipments and the value of devices sold this calendar year – or so claims a rather optimistic forecast from Gartner's consultants.…

An Associated Press investigation based on tens of thousands of leaked documents revealed Tuesday that American technology companies designed and built core components of China's surveillance apparatus over the past 25 years, selling billions of dollars in equipment to Chinese police and government agencies despite warnings about human rights abuses. IBM partnered with Chinese defense contractor Huadi in 2009 to develop predictive policing systems for the "Golden Shield" project, AP reports, citing classified government blueprints. The technology enabled mass detentions in Xinjiang, where administrators assigned 100-point risk scores to Uyghurs with deductions for growing beards or being aged 15-55. Dell promoted a laptop with "all-race recognition" capabilities on its WeChat account in 2019. Thermo Fisher Scientific marketed DNA kits as "designed" for ethnic minorities including Uyghurs and Tibetans until August 2024. Oracle, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, and VMware sold geographic mapping software, facial recognition systems, and cloud infrastructure to Chinese police through the 2010s. The surveillance network tracks "key persons" whose movements are restricted and monitored, with one estimate suggesting 55,000 to 110,000 people were placed under residential surveillance in the past decade. China now has more surveillance cameras than the rest of the world combined.

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Pakistan has built surveillance systems that it is actively using to spy on millions of its citizens and to block millions of internet sessions, according to Amnesty International. The Asian nation's Lawful Intercept Management System enables intelligence agencies to tap calls and texts across all four major mobile operators. A Chinese-built firewall, WMS 2.0, currently blocks approximately 650,000 web links and restricts platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and X. The surveillance infrastructure combines technology from Chinese company Geedge Networks, U.S.-based Niagara Networks, France's Thales DIS, Germany's Utimaco, and UAE-based Datafusion. Balochistan province has experienced years-long internet blackouts under the system.

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For the third time in a decade

Streaming platform Plex is warning some users to reset their passwords after suffering yet another breach.…

Netherlands based Nebius Group to deliver capacity from facility in New Jersey

As the AI frenzy shows no signs of letting up, Microsoft has signed an agreement that could be worth up to $19.4 billion with Netherlands-based Nebius Group – formerly known as Yandex N.V. – in exchange for access to its GPU infrastructure over five years.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: X enthusiast and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it impossible to determine whether social media posts are really written by humans, he posted. The realization came while reading (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which were praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software programming service that takes on Anthropic's Claude Code in May. Lately, that subreddit has been so filled with posts from self-proclaimed Code users announcing that they moved to Codex that one Reddit user even joked: "Is it possible to switch to codex without posting a topic on Reddit?" This left Altman wondering how many of those posts were from real humans. "I have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it's all fake/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," he confessed on X. He then live-analyzed his reasoning. "I think there are a bunch of things going on: real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways, the hype cycle has a very 'it's so over/we're so back' extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i'm extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots)." [...] Altman also throws a dig at the incentives when social media sites and creators rely on engagement to make money. Fair enough. But then Altman confesses that one of the reasons he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts in this subreddit might be bots is because OpenAI has also been "astroturfed." That typically involves posts by people or bots paid for by the competitor, or paid by some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor plausible deniability. [...] Altman surmises, "The net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago." If that's true, who's fault is it? GPT has led models to become so good at writing, that LLMs have become a plague not just to social media sites (which have always had a bot problem) but to schools, journalism, and the courts.

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First, server products go end of life, now datacenter gets the chop, and larger customers will pay more

Atlassian is discontinuing its datacenter products, including Jira, Confluence and Bamboo, in favor of Atlassian Cloud. There is a partial exception for Bitbucket, a source code repository manager, which will have a license option covering both cloud and datacenter.…

Dreams of one satellite constellation die so another can live

EchoStar has agreed to sell the company's AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses to SpaceX in a transaction worth $17 billion.…

Contract tender follows 'alarming' safeguarding failure at border with undocumented kids

The UK's Home Office is offering £1.3 million ($1.7 million) to developers of age-determining software - a tech it wants to deploy widely across its systems.…

Ivalo XE handset targets governments and security critical sectors, though Qualcomm silicon keeps it tied to the US

Finnish phone maker HMD Global is launching a business unit called HMD Secure to target governments and other security-critical customers, and has its first device ready to go.…

Starting in 2026, Red Hat's back-office staff in HR, finance, legal, and accounting will be transferred to IBM, while engineering, product, sales, and marketing teams remain at Red Hat -- at least for now. The Register reports: According to a communication sent to employees, those in General & Administrative areas will join IBM, including the lion's share of the people working in the HR, finance, accounting, and legal units at Red Hat. A source told us the switch will be "implemented this year," although in some countries "it might take longer due to legal constraints." The leadership running those teams will remain within the Red Hat fold. Some are nervous about the move, with tech companies -- notably IBM -- eliminating duplicated roles to consolidate back-office functions. In January -- as has happened in recent years -- IBM again forecast annual savings of $3.5 billion, partly through job cuts. There is no public data on the size of the G&A population within Red Hat but the total workforce is understood to be about 19,000 worldwide, with the bulk of those employed in the engineering, sales, and support divisions. The team remaining at Red Hat will be part of the central Strategy & Operations group managed by Mike Ferris. As such, engineering, product, sales, and marketing personnel will be unaffected. For now at least. "Culture has been dead for at least 1 year now," said Reddit user Purple_Afternoon 966. "The experience might be different depending on the department, but there is nothing left from the open culture praised. We have now micromanagement, decision making from middle management that clearly have no idea of what we do and how and trying to implement ideas that they read somewhere, with no context, data and not giving answer or addressing feedback."

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AI security reviews add new risks, say researchers

App security outfit Checkmarx says automated reviews in Anthropic's Claude Code can catch some bugs but miss others – and sometimes create new risks by executing code while testing it.…

From fast food fiascos to botched databases, there are fresh honors for machine learning misadventures

It was bound to happen. The Darwin Awards are being extended to include examples of misadventures involving overzealous applications of AI.…

Report warns creaking infrastructure undermines the National Crime Agency's efficiency and effectiveness

The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) clings to legacy systems and relies on an IT strategy that lacks clarity, a policing watchdog has found.…

Dev admits the game once ate an entire CPU core

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has come clean and admitted that the worst bug he ever shipped was in... Pinball.…

Google rolled out three big Gemini updates: the app now supports audio uploads (with tiered limits for free vs. paid users), Search gains AI Mode in five new languages, and NotebookLM expands to generate reports, study guides, quizzes, and other formats in over 80 languages. The Verge reports: According to a Monday post on X by Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, audio file compatibility was the "#1 request" to the Gemini app. Free Gemini users max out at 10 minutes of audio, and five free prompts each day. AI Pro or AI Ultra users, meanwhile, can upload audio up to three hours in length. All Gemini prompts accommodate up to 10 files across various file formats, including within ZIP files. Additionally, Google Search's AI Mode has rolled out five new language options: Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the integration of Gemini 2.5 with Search, according to a company blog: "With this expansion, more people can now use AI Mode to ask complex questions in their preferred language, while exploring the web more deeply." The Gemini-powered NotebookLM software is also getting an update in the form of new report styles in over 80 languages based on a user's uploaded documents, files, and other media.

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Charities welcome change, but critics warn the law is already too broad

Tech companies will be legally required to prevent content involving self-harm from appearing on their platforms – rather than responding and removing it – in a planned amendment to the UK's controversial Online Safety Act.…

Prepare to take tests in stuff you already know how to do, just to keep you sharp

Using AI may cause some of your skills atrophy, and your employer therefore needs to take steps to keep you sharp.…

Including messages sent to users, a potential problem for the privacy-conscious

Encrypted messaging app Signal is rolling out a free storage system for its users, with extra space if folks are willing to pay for it.…