Trillion-dollar internet giants don't need freebies, watchdog warns, as giveaways double in a year The US state of Virginia forfeited $1.6 billion in tax revenue through datacenter exemptions in fiscal 2025 – up 118 percent on the prior year – as the AI-driven construction boom accelerates.…

Proposal targets long-standing behavior as 'an X11ism' Opinion  Ever since Linux got a graphical desktop, you could middle-click to paste – but if GNOME gets its way, that's going away soon, and from Firefox too.…

Committee told shifting timelines could alter automatic reversals in UK's historic Fujitsu computing scandal The Post Office's Horizon computer system may have been deployed earlier than thought, potentially affecting which convictions get automatically quashed under legislation introduced to speed up justice in one of the biggest scandals in recent British history, MPs heard yesterday.…

High-risk system compromised long before intrusion was finally spotted The UK's Ministry of Justice spent £50 million ($67 million) on cybersecurity improvements at the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) before the high-profile cyberattack it disclosed last year.…

Production halts and supply-chain disruption left luxury automaker reeling in fiscal Q3 Brit luxury automaker Jaguar Land Rover has reported devastating preliminary Q3 results that lay bare the cascading consequences of a crippling cyberattack, revealing wholesale volumes collapsed more than two-fifths year-on-year.…

The rise will be postponed until you hit F1 to continue Bork!Bork!Bork!  The baddest of AI bad guys, the Terminator, has confirmed what the vast majority of IT professionals already know. The machines are not about to rise, not until they can deal with that pesky battery voltage.…

Customers report being locked out after grabbing the password manager via F-Droid Some HSBC mobile banking customers in the UK report being locked out of the bank's app after installing the Bitwarden password manager via an open source app catalog.…

Department for Work and Pensions lines up bot bouncers for one of Europe's largest call-handling systems The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is set to introduce a conversational AI platform it hopes will steer calls from citizens with queries about their benefits. The contract is worth up to £23 million.…

The company has also redesigned the X1 Carbon’s internals for easier repairs If there was a kingdom of laptop screen flexibility, Lenovo would take the crown. Last year, the company released the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, with a mechanical screen that could roll out to increase its size from 14 to 16.7 inches. Now, it’s back with the ThinkPad Rollable XD concept laptop that expands from 13.3 to 16 inches at the touch of a button or a swipe, along with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist, which uses a motor to rotate its screen and follow you around the room.…

Amazon's community surveillance biz bets on AI to recognize danger A year after a series of fires obliterated communities in Los Angeles, Amazon's Ring security service has announced a feature called Fire Watch intended to mitigate future wildfire risk.…

Long after CVEs issued and open source flaws fixed Last fall, Jakub Ciolek reported two denial-of-service bugs in Argo CD, a popular Kubernetes controller, via HackerOne's Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program. Both were assigned CVEs and have since been fixed. But instead of receiving an $8,500 reward for the two flaws, Ciolek says, HackerOne ghosted him for months.…

Munge that corporate data using the LLM of your choice The data platform Snowflake is putting Google's Gemini to work inside its Cortex AI, aiming to give customers access to a foundational model within the boundaries of their data environment across supported clouds, the company told The Register.…

Have your privacy cake and consume the web too Brave Software has reworked its browser's Rust-based adblock engine to make it significantly more memory efficient and perhaps more secure. So you get fewer ads now with fewer MB of RAM.…

Atlas will be deployed to Hyundai and Google facilities this year CES 2026  Remember when Elon Musk predicted that there would be thousands of Optimus robots at Tesla factories by the end of 2025? Well, that didn't happen, but competitor Boston Dynamics has just announced that its humanoid robot, Atlas, is going to the big time.…

Crimson Collective claims 'sophisticated attack' that allows them to 'disconnect every user from their mobile service' Internet service provider Brightspeed confirmed that it's investigating criminals' claims that they stole more than a million customers' records and have listed them for sale for three bitcoin, or about $276,370. …

Neat idea, but with no mention of a dev kit it's another sign of Lego's descent into designing nothing but fun on rails Not even Legos are safe from the inexorable march of smart technology, as the Danish construction toy stalwart introduced a new tech-in-a-brick Smart Play system at CES this week. …

It's crazy, a million-to-one shot, but it might just work What if, rather than make a Linux distro that can run Windows apps, you built the whole distro around Windows binaries instead?…

New Year glitch leaves users staring at connection errors instead of market data For many, the start of a new year is a time to take stock. For Microsoft, it was a time to stop giving it as the company kicked off 2026 with a bug that broke Excel's StockHistory function.…

AI data engineering startup acquisition brings ETL and Spark automation in-house Microsoft has bought Osmos, an AI-assisted data engineering platform, in a bid to enrich its Fabric data platform, encroaching on so-called partners' markets.…

Samsung and SK hynix readying another gouge as server silicon squeeze leaves PCs and phones out in the cold Memory prices are set to spike again as chipmakers prioritize AI server production over consumer devices, with analysts warning of a high double-digit jump in Q1 2026 alone as demand outpaces supply.…

Phishers posing as Booking.com use panic-inducing blue screens to bypass security controls Russia-linked hackers are sneaking malware into European hotels and other hospitality outfits by tricking staff into installing it themselves through fake Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crashes.…

Also: The XPS brand is back If you like to separate your workflow onto multiple monitors but hate the gap and bezel between screens, Dell’s new display was made for you. Announced on Tuesday at CES, the Dell UltraSharp 52 (U5226KW) offers 52 inches of 6K resolution screen real estate that you can divide into up to four virtual monitors, supporting input either from up to four different devices, or one computer that creates that many desktops.…

Fate of Shuttle Discovery remains conspicuously unaddressed in FY2026 agreement text NASA's budget battle took another turn this week as the US House and Senate Appropriations Committees released text rejecting proposed cuts to the space agency.…

Order and contact details accessed via ecommerce partner, and phishing has begun Blockchain security biz Ledger says customer information was accessed in a breach at its ecommerce payment partner Global-e, and is warning that other brands using the platform may also be affected.…

Digital rights campaigners say Britain’s dependence on Big Tech leaves critical systems exposed to foreign law and political pressure The Open Rights Group is warning politicians that the UK is leaning far too heavily on US tech companies to run critical systems, and wants the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill to force a rethink.…