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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…

Reddit has forced Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of infamous r/WallStreetBets, to strip the WallStreetBets name from an upcoming Miami conference after legal threats citing trademark rights. According to a press release, it's the "first known case of a social media company enforcing trademark control over a user-created community." From the report: After years of litigation, courts ultimately sided with Reddit in a decision now referred to as the "Rogozinski Ruling," a precedent that grants plat…

Apple has launched a new AirTag 2 that features improved range, a speaker that's 50% louder, and expanded Apple Watch-based tracking. Pricing stays the same at $29 (or $99 for four). 9to5Mac reports: The new AirTag comes with an upgraded second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for improved range, including when using Precision Finding. From Apple Newsroom: "Apple's second-generation Ultra Wideband chip -- the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watc…

Skylight, an open-source, TikTok-style video app built on the AT Protocol, surged past 380,000 users after last week's shake-up around TikTok's U.S. ownership and privacy concerns. TechCrunch reports: Launched last year and backed by Mark Cuban and other investors, Skylight's mobile app is built on the AT Protocol, the technology that also powers the decentralized X rival Bluesky, which now has north of 42 million users. Skylight, co-founded by CEO Tori White and CTO Reed Harmeyer, offers a bui…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it's the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon's latest Trainium chip on certain benchmarks, and exceeds Google's most recent tensor processing unit (TPU) on others. The chip is already running workloads at Microsoft's data center near Des Moines, Iowa. …

California tech executive Gordon Abas Goodarzi has been arrested and charged with murder in the death of his estranged wife, Aryan Papoli, whose body was found last November down an embankment off Highway 138 in San Bernardino County. Authorities initially believed the injuries were consistent with a fall, but the case was later ruled a homicide following a months-long investigation by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. "Arrest records show that Goodarzi is currently in custody wit…

Google is adding Gemini-powered "Suggested times" to Google Calendar, automatically scanning attendees' calendars to surface the best meeting slots based on availability, work hours, and conflicts. The feature also streamlines rescheduling with one-click alternatives when invitees decline. Digital Trends reports: According to a recent post on the Workspace Updates blog, Gemini in Google Calendar can now help you quickly identify optimal meeting times when creating an event, as long as you have …

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people's private conversations through their phones. [...] the lawsuit claimed Google Assistant would sometimes turn on by mistake -- the phone thinking someone had said its activation phrase when they had not -- and recorded conversations intended to be private. They alleged the recordings were then sent to advertisers for the purpose of creating targeted …

The Trump administration is planning to use AI to write federal transportation regulations, ProPublica reported on Monday, citing the U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers. From the report: The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI's "potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings," agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase "exciting new AI tools available to…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Video game developer and distributor Valve must face a 656 million-pound ($897.7 million) lawsuit in Britain, which alleges it charged publishers excessive commissions for its Steam online store, after a tribunal ruled on Monday the case could continue. Valve was sued in 2024 on behalf of up to 14 million people in the United Kingdom who bought games or additional content through Steam or other platforms since 2018. Lawyers representing children's welfare ad…

California house hunters now have legal protection against the kind of real estate photo trickery that has long plagued the home-buying process, as a new state law requiring disclosure of digitally altered listing images took effect on January 1. Assembly Bill 723 mandates that real estate agents and brokers include a "reasonably conspicuous" statement whenever photos have been altered using editing software or AI to add, remove, or change elements like furniture, appliances, flooring, views or…

An anonymous reader shares a report: An insider who correctly leaked information about Oblivion: Remastered and other titles is warning that GTA 6's physical release could be pushed back. GTA 6 is set to finally launch on November 19, 2026, but fans hoping to get their hands on a physical copy could be stuck waiting even longer. According to a report from Polish site PPE, insider Graczdari says Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two, isn't planning to release a physical edition of GTA 6 at launch.…

Nike says it is investigating a potential data breach, after a group known for cyber attacks reportedly claimed to have leaked a trove of data related to its business operations. From a report: "We always take consumer privacy and data security very seriously," Nike said in a statement. "We are investigating a potential cyber security incident and are actively assessing the situation." The ransomware group World Leaks said on its website that it had published 1.4 terabytes of data from Nike. Re…

Television marks its centenary today, exactly 100 years after Scottish inventor John Logie Baird first demonstrated his electro-mechanical system to journalists and members of the Royal Institution in a cramped attic workshop above what is now Bar Italia in London's Soho. On January 26, 1926, small groups of visitors climbed to 22 Frith Street and watched fuzzy images of a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill appear on screen, followed by each other's faces transmitted from a separate room.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: From Sandisk shareholders to vibe coders, AI is making -- and breaking -- fortunes at a rapid pace. One unlikely beneficiary has been the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, which lucked into a future fortune when ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, gave the island the ".ai" top-level domain in the mid-1990s. Indeed, since ChatGPT's launch at the end of 2022, the gold rush for websites to associate themselves with the burgeoni…