Maybe this will bring in some actual profit?

OpenAI has mitigated ChatGPT behavior that might exacerbate users' mental health issues, claims CEO Sam Altman, so the natural next step is to make ChatGPT act more human again - complete with the ability to generate "erotica for verified adults."…

Apple is teasing the imminent launch of a new MacBook with an M5 chip. In an X post, Apple SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak wrote that “something powerful is coming,” and a short video in the post includes the words “coming soon” and a silhouette of an Apple laptop. Joswiak’s post also includes the […]

OpenAI will soon allow “erotica” for ChatGPT users who verify their age on the platform. In an X post on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will add support for mature conversations when it launches age-gating in December. “As we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users […]

Any ebook reader will let you cram a Beauty and the Beast-sized library’s worth of books in your pocket, but so will your phone. An ebook reader offers a more book-like reading experience, with fewer distractions and less eye strain, and many include extra features, like adjustable frontlighting. Some really are pocketable. Others are waterproof […]

To the slop trough, kiddos!

Not content to shove Copilot into every corner of the enterprise it can think of, Microsoft has announced plans to force feed AI to students across its home state of Washington. …

Crims turned trusted mapping software into a hideout - no traditional malware required

A Chinese state-backed cybergang known as Flax Typhoon spent more than a year burrowing inside an ArcGIS server, quietly turning the trusted mapping software into a covert backdoor.…

California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers “exorbitant” fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts — plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for […]

5CA is a customer service support company that works with Discord. Recently, the chat platform said the vendor had been breached as part of a “security incident” where 70,000 government ID photos may have leaked. Now, 5CA says in a post on its website that it was “not hacked.” According to Discord, “this incident impacted […]

After shaking up the Pokémon formula with Pokémon Legends: Arceus, its successor, Legends: Z-A, pushes things even further - and it's a very welcome change of pace. With Arceus, Nintendo and Game Freak demonstrated how much more vibrant, weird, and exciting the monster catching series could become with a few key changes to the classic […]

Google is trying to make it easier to find time to meet with coworkers and clients. It’s launching a new Gemini AI-powered “Help me schedule” feature that suggests meeting time slots based on your Google Calendar and the context of the message. You can directly insert the suggestions into your email.  The new “Help me […]

Thin phones are in, and Motorola doesn’t want to miss out. It’s teasing the imminent launch of the X70 Air in China, a slim phone with an unexpectedly big battery, which we’re expecting to see launch in Europe as the Edge 70 soon too. The X70 Air is less than 6mm thick, putting it in […]

This relatively affordable AI workstation isn’t about going fast; it’s about doing everything well enough

hands on  Nvidia bills its long-anticipated DGX Spark as the "world's smallest AI supercomputer," and, at $3,000 to $4,000 (depending on config and OEM), you might be expecting the Arm-based mini-PC to outperform its less-expensive siblings.…

If you’re on the fence about trying a foldable smartphone, Motorola’s Razr Ultra (2025) may be the one you’ve been waiting for, and you can pick it up for $999.99 ($300 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. Our reviewer praised its design (the wooden back panel has a layer of actual wood), and found Motorola […]

University team picks up voice calls, texts, and corporate data from orbit with off-the-shelf kit

Geostationary satellites are broadcasting large volumes of unencrypted data to Earth, including private voice calls and text messages as well as consumer internet traffic, researchers have discovered.…

Users left wondering whether to fork it or forget it as another FOSS project bites the dust

The KuzuDB embedded graph database, open source under the MIT license, has been abandoned by its creator and sponsor Kùzu Inc, leaving its community pondering whether to fork or find an alternative.…

Is a smartwatch better than a smartphone? Not which one is more important or which would you rather have, but simply which one is better? This is the kind of question you really never need to ask - but we're here to ask it. Why? Because Google has had a terrific year of gadget launches, […]

Windows 10 is so popular that Windows 11 only overtook it in terms of usage just a few months ago. That's why I'm surprised that Microsoft is still, kind of, going ahead with its end of support cutoff today. At one point last year, I wasn't sure if Microsoft was actually going to end support […]

Japan's beer behemoth still mopping up after ransomware spill that disrupted deliveries and delayed results

Asahi's cyber hangover just got worse, with the brewer now admitting that personal information may have been tapped in last month's attack.…

Protesters slam forced obsolescence outside Microsoft's office

Campaigners staged a protest outside Microsoft's Brussels office yesterday over the company's decision to end support for Windows 10.…

SteelSeries is launching the second generation of its popular Nova 7 wireless gaming headset today, with support for real-time audio control and a massive 40 percent battery life improvement. If you’re not interested in the $599.99 Nova Elite or the $349.99 Nova Pro, the Nova 7 Gen 2 is SteelSeries’ more affordable midrange option at […]

It's been more than a decade since there was a proper Splinter Cell game. So when Derek Kolstad, a writer best-known for creating the John Wick series, approached making the new animated Netflix adaptation, he treated it as if the story continued as the games were dormant. "I wanted to do it almost like the […]

US government shutdown nothing to do with action as space veteran calls move 'an alarming time' for science

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is facing another round of layoffs, with 550 additional employees set to lose their jobs.…

Lucky few randomly selected to trial the feature, which won't fully roll out for several months

Mozilla is working on a built-in VPN for Firefox, with beta tests opening to select users shortly.…

In the early 1970s, long before social media and more than a decade before the earliest internet forums, a woman named Peggie Ames became a human rolodex for trans women in New York state. Born in Buffalo, Ames spent years working for gay rights organizations in the rural and suburban areas of Western New York. […]

DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. If that’s not uncanny enough, you’ll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it’s a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that […]

Latest in a long line of EBS flaws leta miscreants remotely compromise enterprise systems to pinch sensitive data

Oracle is rushing out another emergency patch for its embattled E-Business Suite as the fallout from the Clop-linked attacks continues to spread.…

Spotify is expanding shared account features that make it easier for parents to control what their kids listen to. Managed accounts are now launching for Premium Family subscribers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands following a pilot that kicked off last year, allowing account holders to manage a separate music-only […]

Bring Your Copilot To Work Day, anyone?

Microsoft, the corporation that just 13 days ago implored customers to bring their Copilot to work, has now published a report warning of the dangers of Shadow AI.…

I renewed my passport the day after Trump won again. It wouldn’t expire for years, but I did it anyway, along with many trans people I knew who could scrape together the fee. We all had the same thought: get your documents in order now, while you still can. For over a decade, I’ve written […]

Instagram is making a major update to teen accounts that will only allow them to view content similar to what you would see in a PG-13 movie. Under the new system, Instagram will continue to hide content containing nudity, sexual content, or suggestive poses from teens, but now it will also avoid recommending content with strong […]

Challenger seeks to unseat incumbent for machine learning workloads

A fledgling file format that aims to address limitations in the widely-used Parquet is under review for adoption by an open source foundation.…

Warn businesses to act now as high-severity incidents keep climbing

Cyberattacks that meet upper severity thresholds set by the UK government's cyber agents have risen 50 percent in the last year, despite almost zero change in the volume of cases handled.…

Watchdog says it sees no case to investigate discounted FTTP upgrade offer – but will keep an eye on it

Ofcom has declined to intervene after smaller network providers complained that a special upgrade offer from Openreach could threaten competition in the broadband market.…

It’s the end of an era for TiVo. Cord Cutters flagged that the company has removed every digital video recorder product from its website, with TiVo confirming to the publication last week that it has officially ceased making DVR hardware after 26 years in the industry. Its last DVR release was the TiVo Edge in […]

Google, DeepMind, Microsoft also shower UK staff with six-figure salaries

The UK units of some US technology companies are paying average salaries of well into six figures, with some more than matching that with share-based payments, according to annual accounts recently published by Companies House.…

Canonical's Questing Quokka waddles in at 5.7 GB with AppArmor woes

The latest interim release of Ubuntu is here, showcasing some significant changes. This isn't a long-term release, yet many of its differences will be in 26.04 next year.…

On-prem discounts drying up as ERP giant sends 'mixed signals' on pricing

Gartner has reported that SAP customers opting for private cloud have seen price increases of 10 percent or more on renewal proposals if they fail to negotiate a renewal price cap in the original deal.…

Malfunctioning equipment and manual processing cause 90-minute waits

The European Union's new biometric Exit/Entry System (EES) got off to a chaotic start at Prague's international airport, with travelers facing lengthy queues and malfunctioning equipment forcing border staff to process arrivals manually.…

Nvidia will start selling its DGX Spark “personal AI supercomputer” this week. The machine is powerful enough to let users work on sophisticated AI models but small enough to fit on a desktop.   Nvidia said Spark can be ordered online at nvidia.com starting Wednesday, October 15th, as well as from select partners and stores in […]

Systems from Nvidia, Dell, and others available starting Oct. 15

Nvidia's tiniest Grace-Blackwell workstation is finally making its way to store shelves this week, the better part of a year after the GPU giant first teased the AI mini PC, then called Project Digits, at CES.…

Meta, a company that is not shy about bolting new features onto its platforms, is bolting another new feature onto Facebook: jobs. This one is actually a throwback — Facebook initially introduced job postings in 2017, only to retire it less than five years later. But jobs are back now, with an emphasis toward local […]

Microsoft AI just announced its first text-to-image generator, MAI-Image-1, designed and developed in-house. The tech giant, which recently announced its first in-house Microsoft AI models, called the new image generator “the next step on our journey.” Microsoft says it sought feedback from creative professionals in order to avoid “repetitive or generically-stylized outputs.” MAI-Image-1 “excels” at […]

Ads in Google search results are getting a more prominent label, and a way to hide them if you’re not interested. Handy! The thing is, you still have to look at them first. Currently, Google labels paid results on search pages individually with a “sponsored” tag on each one. This change groups them all into […]

After a brutal few months, Tesla sales are finally picking up thanks to expiring federal EV tax credits. But while customers are snatching up Model 3s and Ys, they are increasingly turning up their noses at the newest addition to Tesla’s lineup: the Cybertruck. Tesla only sold 5,385 Cybertrucks in the third quarter, down 63 […]

Then shalt thee change the setting three times, no more!

Microsoft's OneDrive is increasing the creepiness quotient by using AI to spot faces in photos and group images accordingly. Don't worry, it can be turned off – three times a year.…

Cloud support to be ditched on older hardware, customers left with pricey paperweights

Audio equipment biz Bose is discontinuing cloud support for its SoundTouch product line, effectively reducing the premium devices to basic speakers with limited functionality.…

A bill attempting to regulate the ever-growing industry of companion AI chatbots is now law in California, as of October 13th. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 243, billed as “first-in-the-nation AI chatbot safeguards” by state senator Anthony Padilla. The new law requires that companion chatbot developers implement new safeguards — for instance, […]

California joins a growing group of states with a new internet age-gating law after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed AB 1043, the Digital Age Assurance Act. The law mandates that device operating systems and app stores require users to enter their age or date of birth when setting up a new phone or computer. The […]

Outage knocks out phones, broadband – even telco's own status page

Vodafone fell over in the UK this afternoon, with Register readers reporting that many services including mobile coverage, internet services, and even the company's own status page went down.…

The Apple TV Plus streaming service is being rebranded with a “vibrant new identity,” according to the Cupertino company, and is “now simply Apple TV.” The announcement was briefly mentioned at the bottom of Apple’s latest press release regarding the December 12th streaming debut of F1 The Movie. At the time of writing, no changes […]

Every human deserves their own accelerator, says ChatGPT creator

Broadcom has cuddled up with OpenAI as the ChatGPT outfit looks for ever more help building out the vast infrastructure it needs to deliver on its dreams of advanced intelligence – and possibly even a profit some day.…

'We will never stop,' say crooks, despite retiring twice in the space of a month

The Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH) cybercrime collective - compriseed primarily of teenagers and twenty-somethings - announced it will go dark until 2026 following the FBI's seizure of its clearweb site.…

All-in-one toolkit or over-ambitious feature creep? You decide

Version 1.3 of the Bun JavaScript runtime and toolkit has landed, pushing forward the project's goal to consolidate fragmented JavaScript toolchains into a single solution. Yet the rapid expansion has some developers questioning whether Bun is trying to do too much, too fast.…

EcoFlow just announced its latest “most powerful” and “easy-to-install” whole-home battery backup system. It’s called the Delta Pro Ultra X because when you’ve already launched the superlative-laced Delta Pro Ultra in 2024, the only thing left is to add a variable to the name. Perhaps that X stands for 60 percent, which is the increase in […]

OpenAI is teaming up with Broadcom to produce its own computer chips to power its AI data centers. The deal is the latest in a series of partnerships designed to reduce the company’s reliance on Nvidia and secure enough computing power to fuel apps like ChatGPT and Sora and realize its mission to develop superintelligent […]

Anduril, the military tech company founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, has announced the first hardware to come out of its recent partnership with Meta: EagleEye, an AI-powered mixed-reality (MR) system designed to be built into soldiers’ helmets. The modular hardware is a “family of systems,” according to Anduril’s announcement, including a heads-up display, spatial […]

Salesforce CEO praises Trump before walking back criticism of city's policing

San Francisco’s political establishment rounded on Marc Benioff over the weekend after the Salesforce founder backed the idea of sending in the National Guard to clean up the city’s streets.…

GPU-based timing attack inspired by decade-old iframe technique

Security researchers have resurrected a 12-year-old data-stealing attack on web browsers to pilfer sensitive info from Android devices.…

Redmond argued schools, education authorities are responsible for GDPR

An Austrian digital privacy group has claimed victory over Microsoft after the country's data protection regulator ruled the software giant "illegally" tracked students via its 365 Education platform and used their data.…

Vivo has announced the X300 and X300 Pro, its latest flagship phones, and they look closer to the company’s even more premium Ultra handsets than ever. On paper, the Pro’s camera setup looks just as good as the X200 Ultra’s, especially thanks to offering support for the same add-on telephoto extender lens introduced with that […]

Another flawless demonstration or unplanned explosion await

SpaceX is counting down to today's 11th flight test of its monster Starship rocket, with weather looking suitable for the opening of the launch window at 18:15 CT (or around 17:00 CT, if the company's billionaire boss is to be believed).…

Bid for transparency on consumption evaporates with Newsom veto

California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed legislation requiring data centers to disclose their water consumption, even as he champions efforts to address the state's water scarcity challenges.…

The United Kingdom has slapped 4Chan with a £20,000 (around $26,000) fine in a bid to clamp down on platforms that are hindering Online Safety Act (OSA) investigations. UK telecoms regulator Ofcom says the fine was issued after the controversial social media site ignored “legally-binding information requests” related to global revenue and its illegal harms […]

Beijing insists it's business as usual – Washington might see it differently

China's competition regulator has launched an investigation into Qualcomm's purchase of Israeli firm Autotalks, the latest salvo in the escalating tech trade war between Washington and Beijing.…

Microsoft admits its media creation tool 'might not work as expected'

Microsoft has broken its own Windows 11 media creation tool just as millions of users face a deadline to abandon Windows 10 — and with less than 24 hours until support officially ends.…

Slack is testing an update for Slackbot that transforms it into an AI assistant. Presently, it operates as a tool for delivering reminders and notifications. With the update, Slackbot can create custom plans tailored to your workspace, sift through a mountain of messages, gather information from a range of Slack channels, and more. “Slackbot today […]

It feels like the rollout of Wi-Fi 7 is barely out of the gate, but TP-Link is already making advancements towards the next generation of connectivity. The company announced on Monday that it has successfully tested an early prototype of Wi-Fi 8 hardware, marking a “critical milestone” in its development. While the test is light […]