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msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 16:00 EDT

WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties

WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark. The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 15:00 EDT

Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year

Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 14:10 EDT

Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing

An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources said that Palo Alto's findings that China was tied to the sprawling hacking spree were dialed back following last month's news, first... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 13:10 EDT

Microsoft Plans Smartphone-Style Permission Prompts for Windows 11 Apps

Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company's Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding user settings, installing unwanted software, and modifying core Windows experiences without permission. A separate initiative called Windows Baseline Security Mode will enfor Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 12:12 EDT

Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser

An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation. The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 11:00 EDT

Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool

Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 10:03 EDT

The "Are You Sure?" Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind

The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains. The behavior, known in the research community as sycophancy, stems from... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 09:00 EDT

Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers

AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid. In a... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 07:00 EDT

Meta Auditor EY Raised Red Flag on Data-Center Accounting

Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 04:00 EDT

US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says

Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world." Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/12/2026 01:00 EDT

Siri's AI Overhaul Delayed Again

Apple's long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting. The new Siri -- first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 -- struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and sometimes... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 22:44 EDT

Anthropic Safety Researcher Quits, Warning 'World is in Peril'

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks. Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 20:45 EDT

With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

Ring's Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted "Search Party," a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who left in 2023 and returned... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 17:45 EDT

Is Linux Mint Burning Out? Developers Consider Longer Release Cycle

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project's current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process "works very well" and delivers steady improvements, they admit... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 16:00 EDT

A Hellish 'Hothouse Earth' Getting Closer, Scientists Say

The world is closer than thought to a "point of no return" after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. From a report: Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish "hothouse Earth" climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 15:01 EDT

US Had Almost No Job Growth in 2025

An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. economy experienced almost zero job growth in 2025, according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: hiring has picked up in 2026. Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data, and found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 14:00 EDT

EVs Could Be Cheaper To Own Than Gas Cars in Africa by 2040

Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems -- solar panels, batteries and an inverter -- could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent by 2040. The analysis considered total cost of ownership including sticker price, financing and... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 13:01 EDT

UK Orders Deletion of Country's Largest Court Reporting Archive

The UK's Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country's largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021. Courtsdesk's research found that journalists received no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearings, that court case listings were accurate on just 4.2% of... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 12:00 EDT

Are CDs Making a Comeback? A Statistical Analysis

Reports of the compact disc's death may have been slightly premature, according to a new analysis from Stat Significant that finds CD sales as a share of U.S. music industry revenue have quietly stabilized after years of steep decline. RIAA data shows CD revenue share fell from 7.15% in 2018 to 3.04% in 2022 but has since flatlined at roughly 3%, coming in at 3.14% in 2023 and 3.06% in... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 02/11/2026 11:00 EDT

HP Now Rents Gaming Laptops

HP has quietly launched a gaming laptop subscription service called the OMEN Gaming Subscription that lets customers pay a monthly fee to use one of several gaming laptops but never actually own the hardware, even after paying well past the machine's retail price. The service ranges from $50 a month for an HP Victus 15-inch laptop with an RTX 4050 to $130 a month for an Omen Max 16 with... Read more ›

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15.05.2026 21:17
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