Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door
It's a threat straight out of sci-fi, and fiendishly hard to detect
Sleeper agent-style backdoors in AI large language models pose a straight-out-of-sci-fi security threat.…
TheRegister
Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar
Picks chap who used to lead Redmond’s security, lures replacement from Google
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has decided Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar, and shifted Charlie Bell, the company’s executive veep for security, into the new role.…
AI’s lust for memory drags down the smartphone industry, and Qualcomm with it
On the upside, House of the Snapdragon has started shipping its own AI silicon
Qualcomm has warned that soaring memory prices will mean the smartphone industry will slow, news that so spooked investors they sent the company’s share price sliding by 11 percent.…
It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year
With revenue topping $400B for the first time, the Chocolate Factory is at no risk of putting itself in the poor house
Google’s parent Alphabet is doubling down on generative AI in 2026. On Wednesday's earnings call, the search and advertising giant boosted its full-year capital expenditures target to between $175 and $185 billion, roughly twice what it spent last year.…
Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing
Proposed bills in New York and elsewhere threaten makers, Adafruit says
State and federal lawmakers have stepped up their efforts to prevent the creation of 3D printed guns. But Adafruit, a maker of electronics kits, warns that the proposed legislation is so broad it threatens everyone involved in open source manufacturing and technology education.…
Workday reveals around 400 staff soon won't have to work another day
Job cuts to fall hardest on non-revenue generating roles on the Global Customer Operations team
Workday is laying off about two percent of its staff in a bid to align its people with its “highest priorities,” but at a significant cost to its margins for the quarter and the year, the company announced on Wednesday.…
Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame
RAG bots could overtake human visitors on publisher sites this year, trackers tell us
The AI bot takeover of the internet continues apace, and the latest data suggests the surge is being driven less by model-training scrapes and more by the growing use of AI tools as a stand-in for web search.…
Positron: we don’t need no fancy HBM to compete with Nvidia’s Rubin
Pleb-tier LPDDR5x apparently good enough for Arm-backed AI startup's next-gen Asimov accelerators
On paper, Positron's next-gen Asimov accelerators, no doubt named for the beloved science fiction author, don't look like much of a match for Nvidia's Rubin GPUs.…
AWS intruder achieved admin access in under 10 minutes thanks to AI assist, researchers say
LLMs automated most phases of the attack
UPDATED A digital intruder broke into an AWS cloud environment and in just under 10 minutes went from initial access to administrative privileges, thanks to an AI speed assist.…
Anthropic cements its position as the not-OpenAI with no-ads pledge
As profit-starved AI companies scramble to monetize chat interactions, Claude bets on trust
Anthropic has taken the high road by committing to keep its Claude AI model family free of advertising.…
Critical SolarWinds Web Help Desk bug under attack
US agencies told to patch by Friday
Attackers are exploiting a critical SolarWinds Web Help Desk bug - less than a week after the vendor disclosed and fixed the 9.8-rated flaw. That's according to America's lead cyber-defense agency, which set a Friday deadline for federal agencies to patch the security flaw.…
Rise of AI means companies could pass on SaaS
The writing is on the wall as AI companies race to add vertical functionality
Software stocks have taken a beating over the last month as investors grow concerned that AI could put vertical SaaS vendors out of business.…
US Army looks for robots that can clean up chemical and bioweapons messes
Just in time for the predicted rise of AI-assisted threats
It's bot versus bot! Just in time for the predicted rise of AI-made biological and chemical weapons, the US Army has plans to fight autonomy with autonomy by getting its hands on some bot-based chemical weapon cleanup tech.…
Server CPUs join memory in the supply shortage, pushing up prices
Silicon manufacturing issues to blame
Datacenter servers will face a double whammy this year as CPU supply constraints pile on top of an already severe memory shortage. Even so, shipments are still expected to grow at a double-digit rate.…
Estonia hedges its bets on US tech while going all-in on Microsoft
Riigi IT preps European escape plan as it herds civil servants into Redmond's cloud
An Estonian government IT agency is trialling European alternatives to US software providers, even as it moves many of the country’s civil servants to a centrally-managed cloud computing service provided by Microsoft.…
Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes
Only cool dudes should wear a HAT backward
Microsoft is no stranger to things breaking unexpectedly – and now one of its engineers has added a Raspberry Pi to the list.…
DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day
Tool speeds up searches and first draft emails, becomes 'comfort blanket' for Whitehall workers
Microsoft Copilot saved civil servants 19 minutes daily on routine tasks, according to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) research comparing users to a control group of non-users.…
Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files
Gang walks away with nothing, victims are left with irreparable hypervisors
Cybersecurity experts usually advise victims against paying ransomware crooks, but that advice goes double for those who have been targeted by the Nitrogen group. There's no way to get your data back from them!…
UK watchdog to rule on £246M Post Office subsidy over Horizon scandal and IR35
CMA's Subsidy Advice Unit reviewing state aid linked to redress and off-payroll tax costs
The UK competition regulator is set to report on a request for £246 million in subsidies to the Post Office, a publicly owned company, to cover its costs in compensation for the Horizon IT scandal and tax liability for IR35, a mechanism commonly used by tech consultants.…
Microsoft actually does something useful, adds Sysmon to Windows
After years of bolting AI onto everything, Redmond remembers admins exist
There is good news for administrators: Microsoft has delivered on its promise to build Sysmon functionality into Windows.…
Biting the hand that feeds IT