Software

Tokyo cries foul over Sora slop abusing 'irreplaceable treasures' of anime, manga - oh, and copyright law

OpenAI’s Sora 2 video generator has gone viral, particularly among users churning out anime that looks suspiciously like Studio Ghibli and other copyrighted works. Alarmed by the threat to one of its prized cultural exports, Japan has reportedly lodged a formal request that the American firm knock it off.…

More air for the AI bubble, courtesy of firms including xAI, BlackRock

The AI bubble just keeps getting bigger. A consortium featuring BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia, xAI, and MGX is buying Aligned Data Centers in a deal valuing the operator at around $40 billion, in what is reportedly the biggest datacenter acquisition to date.…

Only 13% are AI-ready; the rest are bolting it on and hoping for ROI

Contrary to popular belief, you can't succeed in business (or AI) without really trying. Many orgs are jumping on the AI bandwagon without the infrastructure they need to make it work or track results, Cisco says. Most haven't even defined what they want their AI agents to do.…

Vibe coding may have played a role in what took researchers months to fix

Developers of VS Code extensions are leaking sensitive secrets left, right and center, according to researchers who worked with Microsoft to combat an issue that could have led to some nasty supply chain attacks.…

Raymond Chen says the OS used green-screen overlays to fake video playback – with curious side effects

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has answered a lingering Windows question – why did video screenshots keep playing in Paint?…

Downstream Linux projects line up behind the latest release

A month after Debian 13.1's release, some of the more visible downstream forks, including Raspberry Pi OS, have decided it's time to incorporate the latest version of the main OS into their builds.…

Second huge increase in six months sees some devs heading for the exit

Augment has updated its pricing model for Augment Code, an AI coding assistant, to be based on AI usage rather than message interactions. The company said its existing model "isn't sustainable" but users have calculated that the new one is more than ten times as expensive.…

Action alleges Redmond unfairly hikes costs for businesses running Windows Server outside Azure

The team pushing a £2 billion legal claim accusing Microsoft of overcharging businesses that use its software on rival clouds has called for further participants ahead of its first hearing in December.…

Germany's northernmost state bins Outlook – and tens of thousands of Redmond licenses

Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany, has finally concluded one element of a long running project to eject Microsoft from its infrastructure by giving Exchange Server the boot.…

Think tank cautions that without job cuts or capital savings, the math doesn't add up

UK government's plans to save £45 billion through the application of AI in the public sector lack clarity and are based on broad-brush assumptions, Members of Parliament have heard.…

And which will crash, repeatedly, until users learn how to handle it safely

Column  Steve Jobs probably didn't remember how many times he skinned his knees learning to ride a bike before describing a personal computer as a "bicycle for the mind." Jobs' point was that both tools help us to go further, faster, with just a little extra effort.…

In the Agentic Enterprise, "AI doesn’t replace people, it elevates them"

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff heralded the arrival of the agentic era during his keynote at the CRM giant's annual Dreamforce conference.…

Laptop maker's apolitical endorsement of politically contentious projects meets resistance

Six days ago, upgradeable laptop maker Framework tried to convince its fractious user community to live in a "big tent" after a Debian developer objected to the company's sponsorship of Hyprland and its social media promotion of Omarchy, with both projects associated with politically polarizing viewpoints.…

New clusters to feature 800,000 Nvidia Blackwell and 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450X GPUs

Oracle on Tuesday revealed it would field more than 18 zettaFLOPS worth of AI infrastructure from Nvidia and AMD by the second half of next year.…

Maybe this will bring in some actual profit?

OpenAI has mitigated ChatGPT behavior that might exacerbate users' mental health issues, claims CEO Sam Altman, so the natural next step is to make ChatGPT act more human again - complete with the ability to generate "erotica for verified adults."…

To the slop trough, kiddos!

Not content to shove Copilot into every corner of the enterprise it can think of, Microsoft has announced plans to force feed AI to students across its home state of Washington. …

This relatively-affordable AI workstation isn’t about going fast; it’s about doing everything well enough

hands on  Nvidia bills its long-anticipated DGX Spark as the "world's smallest AI supercomputer," and, at $3,000 to $4,000 (depending on config and OEM), you might be expecting the Arm-based mini-PC to outperform its less-expensive siblings.…

Users left wondering whether to fork it or forget it as another FOSS project bites the dust

The KuzuDB embedded graph database, open source under the MIT license, has been abandoned by its creator and sponsor Kùzu Inc, leaving its community pondering whether to fork or find an alternative.…

Protesters slam forced obsolescence outside Microsoft's office

Campaigners staged a protest outside Microsoft's Brussels office yesterday over the company's decision to end support for Windows 10.…

Lucky few randomly selected to trial the feature, which won't fully roll out for several months

Mozilla is working on a built-in VPN for Firefox, with beta tests opening to select users shortly.…