"Nuclear you can trust," reads the web page promoting "The Egg, an at home nuclear reactor."
Yes, Enron.com is now announcing "a micro-nuclear reactor made to power your home." (A quick reminder from CNN in December. "A company that makes T-shirts bought the Enron trademark and appears to be trying to sell some merch on behalf of the guy behind the satirical conspiracy theory "Birds Aren't Real....") ... [ Read it >> ]

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Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation as a nonprofit in 1985 with four other directors (including MIT computer science professor Gerald Jay Sussman). Sussman remains on the Board of directors, along with EFF co-founder John Gilmore and five others.

Friday the eight directors published a new article explaining how their goal and principles are protected by the nonprofit's governance structure:... [ Read it >> ]

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WordPress co-creator (and Automattic CEO) Matt Mullenweg "has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members," reports TechCrunch, "some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project."

Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications' lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his "vision for a new WordPress era," alluding to a potential fork in the form of "federated and independent repositories." Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed these thoughts in a separate blog post. WP Engine indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand. Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a new WordPress fork. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Friday America's consumer watchdog agency "proposed a rule to give virtual video game currencies protections similar to those of real-world bank accounts..." reports the Washington Post, "so players can receive refunds or compensation for unauthorized transactions, similar to how banks are required to respond to claims of fraudulent activity."... [ Read it >> ]

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As the ecological disaster continues, CNN reports the Palisades Fire near Malibu, California has burned at least 22,660 acres, left 100,000 peope under evacuation orders, left at least 11 people dead and "destroyed thousands of homes and other structures." From the last reports it was only 11% contained, and "flames are now spreading east in the Mandeville Canyon area, approaching Interstate 405, one of LA's busiest freeways." ... [ Read it >> ]

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While CES wraps up this week, "Not all innovation is good innovation," warns Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit's Director of Sustainability (heading their Right to Repair advocacy team). So this year the group held its fourth annual "anti-awards ceremony" to call out CES's "least repairable, least private, and least sustainable products..." (iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens mocked a $2,200 "smart ring" with a battery that only lasts for 500 charges. "Wanna open it up and change the battery? Well you can't! Trying to open it will completely destroy this device...") There's also a category for the worst in security — plus a special award titled "Who asked for this?" — and then a final inglorious prize declaring "the Overall Worst in Show..." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:

New intelligence has led two US intelligence agencies to conclude that it's possible a small number of mysterious health ailments colloquially termed as Havana Syndrome impacting spies, soldiers and diplomats around the world may have been caused by a "novel weapon" wielded by a foreign actor, according to intelligence officials and a new unclassified summary report released on Friday. However, the two agencies are in the minority and the broader intelligence community assessment remains that it is very unlikely that the symptoms were caused by a foreign actor, according to the unclassified report summary issued Friday — even as an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] emphasized that analysts cannot "rule out" the possibility in some small number of cases. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit is taking legal action to ensure the safety and integrity of our AI services," according to a Friday blog post by the unit's assistant general counsel. Microsoft blames "a foreign-based threat-actor group" for "tools specifically designed to bypass the safety guardrails of generative AI services, including Microsoft's, to create offensive and harmful content. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"What if they ban TikTok and people keep using it anyway?" asks the New York Times, saying a pending ban in America "is vague on how it would be enforced"

Some experts say that even if TikTok is actually banned this month or soon, there may be so many legal and technical loopholes that millions of Americans could find ways to keep TikTok'ing. The law is "Swiss cheese with lots of holes in it," said Glenn Gerstell, a former top lawyer at the National Security Agency and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research organization. "There are obviously ways around it...." When other countries ban apps, the government typically orders internet providers and mobile carriers to block web traffic to and from the blocked website or app. That's probably not how a ban on TikTok in the United States would work. Two lawyers who reviewed the law said the text as written doesn't appear to order internet and mobile carriers to stop people from using TikTok. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company's e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack. He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site. "We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page," Tomchuk told TechCrunch. "Each page has at least three photos." OpenAI was sending "tens of thousands" of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions. "OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it's way more," he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site. "Their crawlers were crushing our site," he said "It was basically a DDoS attack."... [ Read it >> ]

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Wikipedia's massive dataset helped researchers identify three styles of curiosity -- "busybody," "hunter," and "dancer" -- based on how users navigate its pages (see: wiki rabbit hole). These curiosity styles reflect broader social trends and highlight curiosity's role in connecting information rather than merely acquiring it. Scientific American reports: In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas. "Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them," says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, cosenior author on a recent study of these curiosity types in Science Advances. "It's not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to stuff that we already know."... [ Read it >> ]

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SysEngineer shares a report from the Associated Press: A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury's north pole. The European and Japanese robotic explorer swooped as close as 183 miles (295 kilometers) above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole. The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of of our solar system's smallest, innermost planet. Cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury's largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers).... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, in an appearance on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, criticized the Biden administration for pushing for censorship around COVID-19 vaccines, the media for hounding Facebook to clamp down on misinformation after the 2016 election, and his own company for complying. Zuckerberg's three-hour interview with Rogan gives a clear window into his thinking during a remarkable week in which Meta loosened its content moderation policies and shut down its DEI programs.... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticized Apple's innovation record and business practices in a Joe Rogan podcast interview on January 10, claiming the iPhone maker has not "invented anything great in a while" and is "just sitting" on its flagship product 20 years after Steve Jobs created it. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon said it is halting some of its diversity and inclusion initiatives, joining a growing list of major corporations that have made similar moves in the face of increasing public and legal scrutiny. From a report: In a Dec. 16 internal note to staffers that was obtained by CNBC, Candi Castleberry, Amazon's VP of inclusive experiences and technology, said the company was in the process of "winding down outdated programs and materials" as part of a broader review of hundreds of initiatives.... [ Read it >> ]

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TechCrunch's Rebecca Szkutak reports: TechCrunch recently surveyed 20 VCs who back startups building for enterprises about what gives an AI startup a moat, or what makes it different compared to its peers. More than half of the respondents said that the thing that will give AI startups an edge is the quality or rarity of their proprietary data. Paul Drews, a managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, told TechCrunch that it's really hard for AI startups to have a moat because the landscape is changing so quickly. He added that he looks for startups that have a combination of differentiated data, technical research innovation, and a compelling user experience.... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon is shutting down its "Prime Try Before You Buy" service on January 31, according to a notice on its website. The offering operated similarly to apparel subscription services like Stitch Fix and Rent the Runway, allowing Prime members to try out apparel-related products and only pay for items they wanted to keep. CNBC reports: An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the move, which was first reported by The Information. "Given the combination of Try Before You Buy only scaling to a limited number of items and customers increasingly using our new AI-powered features like virtual try-on, personalized size recommendations, review highlights, and improved size charts to make sure they find the right fit, we're phasing out the Try Before You Buy option, effective January 31, 2025," the spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A leading education software maker has admitted its IT environment was compromised in a cyberattack, with students and teachers' personal data -- including some Social Security Numbers and medical info -- stolen. PowerSchool says its cloud-based student information system is used by 18,000 customers around the globe, including the US and Canada, to handle grading, attendance records, and personal information of more than 60 million K-12 students and teachers. On December 28 someone managed to get into its systems and access their contents "using a compromised credential," the California-based biz told its clients in an email seen by Register this week.... [ Read it >> ]

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ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced today that it will not launch the Venu live sports streaming service. "After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service," the companies said in a joint statement. "In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels. We are proud of the work that has been done on Venu to date and grateful to the Venu staff, whom we will support through this transition period." The Verge reports: ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery first announced Venu last year, and it was supposed to launch in the fall of 2024. The service would've given viewers access to a swath of live games from the NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and more from several linear channels, including ESPN, ABC, Fox, Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, TNT, and others.... [ Read it >> ]

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Los Angeles authorities have vowed to prosecute illegal drone operators after a civilian drone collided with a Canadian CL-415 firefighting plane combating the Palisades Fire, causing damage that grounded the aircraft and temporarily halted all aerial firefighting operations. CNN reports: The specifically designed CL-415 firefighting planes are used to scoop up more than 1,500 gallons of ocean water to drop on active fires. The plane in question, Quebec 1, "sustained wing damage and remains grounded and out of service," Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson Erik Scott said, adding that there were no reported injuries. The damaged plane will be prioritized for repair and should be back up flying by Monday, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone said Friday. The collision caused the temporary grounding of all aircraft responding to the Palisades Fire, The War Zone reported, citing Cal Fire. It was one of the two such planes deployed to the site, The War Zone said. "You will be arrested, you will be prosecuted, and you will be punished to the full extent of the law," said Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman in a statement.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: JPMorgan Chase is summoning all staff back to the office, becoming the latest corporate giant to call time on era of remote and hybrid working sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The US's largest bank, which has some 316,000 employees worldwide, announced on Friday that all workers on hybrid work schedules will be required to return to the office five days a week from March. [...] Few top executives have been more vocal in making the case for working from the office than Jamie Dimon, the veteran CEO of JPMorgan, who -- as early as 2021 -- sought to restore pre-pandemic working habits. "And everyone is going to be happy with it," he told a Wall Street Journal event that year. "And yes, the commute -- you know, people don't like commuting. But so what?"... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTubers and other digital content creators are selling their unused video footage to AI companies seeking exclusive videos to better train their AI algorithms, oftentimes netting thousands of dollars per deal. OpenAI, Alphabet's Google, AI media company Moonvalley and several other AI companies are collectively paying hundreds of content creators for access to their unpublished videos, according to people familiar with the negotiations. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic's handling of a disputed plugin. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately -- including for hiring, training and picking suppliers. Axios: Meta said it was changing course because the "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing," per a memo by Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources.... [ Read it >> ]

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Developer Q&A platform StackOverflow appears to be facing an existential crisis as volume of new questions on the site has plunged 75% from the 2017 peak and 60% year-on-year in December 2024, according to StackExchange Data Explorer figures.

The decline accelerated after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, with questions falling 76% since then. Despite banning AI-generated answers two years ago, StackOverflow has embraced AI partnerships, striking deals with Google, OpenAI and GitHub.... [ Read it >> ]

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The world's most powerful supercomputer, capable of 2.79 quintillion calculations per second, has been unveiled at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, designed primarily to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and run other classified simulations. The $600 million system, named El Capitan, consists of 87 computer racks weighing 1.3 million pounds and draws 30 megawatts of power. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Sales of electric vehicles in Japan fell 33% year-on-year to 59,736 cars in 2024, the first decline in four years, according to data from car dealers and importers compiled by Nikkei on Thursday. From the report: EVs' share of all vehicle sales fell below 2% in Japan, the lowest among major advanced economies. While global EV sales are still growing, albeit more slowly, Japan's reluctance to adopt EVs is becoming increasingly apparent.... [ Read it >> ]

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Early life exposure to toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" could impact economic success in adulthood, new first-of-its-kind research [PDF] suggests. From a report: The Iowa State University and US Census Bureau working paper compared the earnings, college graduation rates, and birth weights of two groups of children -- those raised around military installations that had firefighting training areas, and those who lived near bases with no fire training site. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Three mathematicians have developed a breakthrough method for proving whether numbers can be written as fractions, solving a problem that has puzzled researchers for decades. Frank Calegari, Vesselin Dimitrov and Yunqing Tang proved the irrationality of an infinite collection of numbers related to the Riemann zeta function, building on Roger Apery's landmark 1978 proof about a single such number. ... [ Read it >> ]

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India's homegrown digital payments ecosystem, anchored by two systems, is challenging Visa and Mastercard's dominance in the world's most populous nation. The backbone is UPI, a nine-year-old bank-to-bank payment network that processes over 13 billion monthly transactions through QR codes and phone numbers, accounting for 71% of all transactions and 36% of consumer spending, according to Bernstein. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Crypto Briefing: The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has been authorized to sell approximately 69,370 Bitcoin seized in connection with the Silk Road darknet marketplace, a haul currently valued at around $6.5 billion, DB News reported Wednesday. The decision is set to end a years-long legal dispute over the BTC stash's ownership. On December 30, a federal judge ruled in favor of the DOJ's request to liquidate the crypto assets, the report said. Battle Born Investments, which had asserted a claim to the Bitcoin stash through a bankruptcy estate, ultimately failed in its bid to delay the sale.... [ Read it >> ]

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An IT engineer from Wales lost a decade-long legal battle to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins from a Newport landfill. The hard drive, accidentally thrown away in 2013, is now valued between $700-750 million. crypto.news reports: However, Judge Keyser KC ruled there were no "reasonable grounds" for the claim, citing environmental concerns and the council's ownership of the landfill contents. The landfill reportedly holds 1.4 million tonnes of waste, but Howells claims to have pinpointed the hard drive's location to a 100,000-ton section. Reacting to the ruling, Howells expressed frustration, calling it a "kick in the teeth," according to the BBC.... [ Read it >> ]

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Scientists said the world just reached a grim milestone: the first full year where global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial times. Reuters reports: The milestone was confirmed by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which said climate change is pushing the planet's temperature to levels never before experienced by modern humans. "The trajectory is just incredible," C3S director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters, describing how every month in 2024 was the warmest or second-warmest for that month since records began.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some of the world's most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement. The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games likeCandy Crushand dating apps like Tinder to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem -- not code developed by the app creators themselves -- this data collection is likely happening without users' or even app developers' knowledge.... [ Read it >> ]

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Christie Wilcox reports via Science.org: Both longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) and humans can figure out how to work together to move an unwieldy object through a series of obstacles. So scientists pitted the two against each other. They had individuals and groups of different sizes of both species maneuver a T-shaped object through holes in walls (as seen in the video above), both of which were scaled to the body size of the participants. This kind of puzzle is hard for ants because their pheromone-based communication doesn't account for the kind of geometry needed to get the object through the doors. To make the experiments even more comparable, the team also took away the humans' communication in some of the trials by making them wear sunglasses and masks and forbidding talking and gestures. So the people, like the ants, had to work together without language, relying on the forces generated by their fellow participants to figure out how to move the T-shaped piece.... [ Read it >> ]

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The Biden administration plans one additional round of restrictions on the export of AI chips before leaving office, "a final push in his effort to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of China and Russia," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The US wants to curb the sale of AI chips used in data centers on both a country and company basis, with the goal of concentrating AI development in friendly nations and getting businesses around the world to align with American standards, according to people familiar with the matter. The result would be an expansion of semiconductor caps to most of the world -- an attempt to control the spread of AI technology at a time of soaring demand. The regulations, which could be issued as soon as Friday, would create three tiers of chip trade restrictions, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.... [ Read it >> ]

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said quantum computers won't be very useful for another 20 years, causing stocks in this emerging sector to plunge more than 40% for a total market value loss of over $8 billion. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that'd probably be on the early side. If you said 30, is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it," Huang said during a Q&A with analysts. PCMag reports: The field of quantum computing hasn't gotten nearly as much hype as generative AI and the tech giants promoting it in the past few years. Right now, part of the reason quantum computers aren't currently that helpful is because of their error rates. Nord Quantique CEO Julien Lemyre previously told PCMag that quantum error correction is the future of the field, and his firm is working on a solution. The errors that qubits, the basic unit of information in a quantum machine, currently make result in quantum computers being largely unhelpful. It's an essential hurdle to overcomeâ"but we don't currently know if or when quantum errors will be eliminated.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Global banks will cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as artificial intelligence encroaches on tasks currently carried out by human workers, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Chief information and technology officers surveyed for BI indicated that on average they expect a net 3% of their workforce to be cut, according to a report published Thursday. Back office, middle office and operations are likely to be most at risk, according to Tomasz Noetzel, the BI senior analyst who wrote the report. Customer services could see changes as bots manage client functions, while know-your-customer duties would also be vulnerable. "Any jobs involving routine, repetitive tasks are at risk," he said. "But AI will not eliminate them fully, rather it will lead to workforce transformation."... [ Read it >> ]

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OpenAI has shut down the developer behind a viral device that could respond to ChatGPT queries to aim and fire an automated rifle. Futurism reports: The contraption, as seen in a video that's been making its rounds on social media, sparked a frenzied debate over our undying attempts to turn dystopian tech yanked straight out of the "Terminator" franchise into a reality. STS 3D's invention also apparently caught the attention of OpenAI, who says it swiftly shut him down for violating its policies. When Futurism reached out to the company, a spokesperson said that "we proactively identified this violation of our policies and notified the developer to cease this activity ahead of receiving your inquiry."... [ Read it >> ]

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Plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg authorized the team behind the company's Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated ebooks and articles for training. They further accuse the company of concealing its actions by stripping copyright information and torrenting the data. TechCrunch reports: In newly unredacted documents filed (PDF) with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta's testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta's use of a data set called LibGen for Llama-related training. LibGen, which describes itself as a "links aggregator," provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement.... [ Read it >> ]

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says IT departments will evolve into human resources managers for AI agents, as companies adopt AI tools across their operations. "In a lot of ways, the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future," Huang told the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. From a report: He believes that in the not so near future IT teams will be tasked with onboarding these agents and ensuring they're kept in line, similarly to how HR teams manage employees. They may need to be trained to use certain vocabulary that's unique to the company, or be given examples of the kind of product the team is looking to develop, or briefed on company culture policies. Instead of just fixing servers and resetting passwords, IT professionals will soon be supervising fleets of digital workers.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal judge this week rejected Google's motion to throw out a class-action lawsuit alleging that it invaded the privacy of users who opted out of functionality that records a users' web and app activities. A jury trial is scheduled for August 2025 in US District Court in San Francisco. The lawsuit concerns Google's Web & App Activity (WAA) settings, with the lead plaintiff representing two subclasses of people with Android and non-Android phones who opted out of tracking. "The WAA button is a Google account setting that purports to give users privacy control of Google's data logging of the user's web app and activity, such as a user's searches and activity from other Google services, information associated with the user's activity, and information about the user's location and device," wrote (PDF) US District Judge Richard Seeborg, the chief judge in the Northern District Of California.... [ Read it >> ]

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AI is coming for your job: 41% of employers intend to downsize their workforce as AI automates certain tasks, a World Economic Forum survey showed Wednesday. From a report: Out of hundreds of large companies surveyed around the world, 77% also said they were planning to reskill and upskill their existing workers between 2025-2030 to better work alongside AI, according to findings published in the WEF's Future of Jobs Report. But, unlike the previous, 2023 edition, this year's report did not say that most technologies, including AI, were expected to be "a net positive" for job numbers. ... [ Read it >> ]

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BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of 'Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers,' an initiative aimed at funding and supporting open development within the Chromium ecosystem. The purpose of this effort is to provide resources and foster collaboration among developers, academia, and tech companies to drive the sustainability and innovation of Chromium projects. Major industry players, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera, have pledged their support.... [ Read it >> ]

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MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings and a tech investment fund are commanding extraordinary premiums in U.S. markets, highlighting unusual price anomalies reminiscent of past market distortions. MicroStrategy shares are trading at more than double the market value of their main asset -- bitcoin holdings -- while closed-end fund Destiny Tech100 recently traded at 11 times its net asset value, down from 21 times earlier in 2024. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Engineering and construction group Larsen & Toubro Chairman S.N. Subrahmanyan has urged employees in India to work 90 hours weekly, including Sundays, surpassing Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy's recent 70-hour workweek proposal.

"What do you do sitting at home? Go to the office and start working," Subrahmanyan said in a leaked internal video. He cited a conversation about Chinese workers' 90-hour weeks versus Americans' 50 hours to justify the stance.... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft kicks off the new year with more job cuts, as fewer than 1% of employees reportedly face the axe. From a report: As first reported by Business Insider, Microsoft is trimming its workforce again, including roles in its security division, with the cuts targeting underperforming employees. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the layoffs with BI but declined to specify how many staffers are affected, stating, "At Microsoft, we focus on high-performance talent." ... [ Read it >> ]

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U.S. software giant Ivanti has warned that a zero-day vulnerability in its widely-used enterprise VPN appliance has been exploited to compromise the networks of its corporate customers. From a report: Ivanti said on Wednesday that the critical-rated vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-0282, can be exploited without any authentication to remotely plant malicious code on Ivanti's Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA Gateways products. Ivanti says its Connect Secure remote-access VPN solution is "the most widely adopted SSL VPN by organizations of every size, across every major industry." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Unprecedented January wildfires in Los Angeles signal an emerging pattern of compound climate disasters, as record-breaking Santa Ana winds up to 100 mph combine with the driest start to a winter season in the city's history.

The Palisades and Eaton fires have each burned over 10,000 acres amid drought conditions that climate scientists say are intensified by global warming. The blazes, occurring weeks earlier than historical fire patterns, come just 16 months after Los Angeles experienced its first tropical storm, illustrating what experts describe as increasingly unpredictable weather extremes driven by climate change.... [ Read it >> ]

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VLC media player, the popular open-source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system. From a report: The new feature automatically generates real-time subtitles -- which can then also be translated in many languages -- for any video using open-source AI models that run locally on users' devices, eliminating the need for internet connectivity or cloud services, VideoLAN demoed at CES.... [ Read it >> ]

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