Iranian media is claiming that the US used backdoors and/or botnets to disable networking equipment during the current war, and Chinese state media is dining out on the allegations. Reports from Iran claim hardware made by Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and MikroTik either rebooted or disconnected during recent attacks on Iran – despite the regime disconnecting…
The UK government is opening £80 million in AI procurement talks with tech firms, drawing on its £500 million sovereign capability fund. An official notice published late last week says the government wants to help validate new AI capabilities and de-risk investment for the wider market by acting as an early customer. Future opportunities might include…
Google has introduced a new Android command-line interface built specifically for AI agents, claiming a 70 percent cut in token usage and three times reduction in task completion time. Using the Android CLI with Google Gemini to build and test an Android application (from official Google video) (click to enlarge) The primary Android development environment…
The European Commission has awarded four contracts designed to advance cloud sovereignty in the EU, but one uses services from S3NS, a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud, raising questions about its real independence. In line with Europe’s push for digital sovereignty, the Commission announced this tender for local cloud services to “strengthen the…
A study into how humans interact with chatbots suggests the fastest way to make an LLM feel human isn’t making it smarter – it’s making it seem nicer. Researchers behind a new study published on Monday, Anthropomorphism and Trust in Human-Large Language Model Interactions, analyzed more than 2,000 human-LLM interactions involving 115 participants, systematically tweaking…
Ten years ago, Dyson kicked off the hair gadget arms race with its $400 Supersonic hairdryer. Today, it’s back with a slightly smaller and cheaper travel-size version. As the name suggests, the $299.99 Supersonic Travel is meant for people on the go — whether that’s a business trip or a jaunt to the gym before…
It’s illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard. But a DIY tritium nuclear battery is far less dramatic – just don’t expect any appreciable amount of energy from it. You don’t even need any specialized supplies, as YouTuber and electrical engineering enthusiast Double M Innovations demonstrated in a recent video….
The NASA Office of Inspector General, the aerospace agency’s auditor, fears that work on next-generation spacesuits won’t finish in time to use them for the planned Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2028. In a report [PDF] published on Monday, the Inspector General points out that NASA kicked off its quest for next-gen spacesuits with…
The feature list for Linux kernel 7.1 is taking shape, and a standout addition has already landed: a new read-write NTFS driver. Now that kernel 7.0 is out, the all-seeing Eye of Torvalds has shifted its gaze to the future kernel 7.1, which is likely to appear in a couple of months. One standout feature…
One app should not modify another app without asking for and receiving your explicit consent. Yet Anthropic’s Claude Desktop for macOS installs files that affect other vendors’ applications without disclosure, even before those applications have been installed, and authorizes browser extensions without consent. Alexander Hanff, a privacy consultant and occasional contributor to The Register, contends…