News without the noise
Technology news: AI, chips and devices, programming, security, crypto and the companies building them.
2296 articles · page 11 of 48 · The Tech front page
Security researchers have found that Muse, Meta's new general-purpose AI agent, can expose personal and business information when users share conversations by web link, despite a URL design apparently intended to keep such content private.
Leaked U.S. Army documents describe a program to deploy autonomous, self-replicating AI agents that would navigate enemy digital networks, identify targets and neutralize them, according to a report by The Intercept. The program, code-named ECHOTRIBBLE, has drawn safety warnings from cybersecurity experts over the risks of offensive AI worms operating with little human oversight.
Anthropic is in discussions with UK-based neocloud provider Nscale for a second multibillion-dollar deal to lease computing capacity at a site in West Virginia, according to a person familiar with the matter. The agreement could be worth around $45 billion and would cover an additional 460-megawatt data center at the same location as an earlier deal, the person said.
A Nigerian national has been sentenced to eight years in prison for orchestrating a series of spearphishing attacks against US tax preparation businesses, stealing more than $3 million from taxpayers through fraudulent tax refunds and loan applications.
China has fired back at the United States over its ban on Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies, condemning the move as an 'overstretching of the concept of national security' as the world's two AI superpowers brace for a tense summit in November.
BIT Asset Management has confirmed that its Bitcoin Fund ETF (BBIT) will begin trading on the SIX Swiss Exchange in November, becoming Switzerland's first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund for retail investors. The fund holds Bitcoin directly and is approved for public offering in Switzerland only.
Nick Cammarata, a researcher at AI startup Goodfire, has published a 26,000-word blog post arguing that large language models may be far easier to understand, monitor and control than previously thought, a claim that has thrown the AI world into debate and drawn both celebration and skepticism.
The UK's financial regulator has told firms that incident reporting must now cover significant AI failures and near-misses, warning that poorly governed artificial intelligence can cause consumer harm, cyber vulnerabilities and operational failures at greater speed and scale.
The newly elected president of the Australian Council for Trade Unions (ACTU), Emma Kingdon, has warned that artificial intelligence is automating entire jobs, being used for surveillance, and making management decisions, as she pledged to push for greater protections against job losses alongside higher wages and workplace flexibility.
Three long-idled US nuclear reactors are set to restart after years offline, aiming to deliver a combined 2.25 gigawatts of power to meet the soaring electricity demands of AI data centers, with tech giants Microsoft and Google signing major offtake agreements.
Google Home speaker owners are reporting that their devices have been continuously downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data in the background, a bug that Google says it is now addressing with a rolling fix.
Crypto exchange Bitget has announced plans to acquire Thailand’s GMO-Z.com Cryptonomics, operator of the Z.com EX trading platform, in a deal that would give it a locally licensed presence in a Southeast Asian market weeks after a major hack hit its wallet infrastructure. Completion is targeted for October 31, subject to regulatory approval.
Bitcoin slipped to around $81,400 on Tuesday, down 0.5% since midnight UTC, as Asian stock markets fell sharply on renewed AI spending concerns and options traders piled into puts for downside protection, despite U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs recording their largest daily inflow in nearly a month.
The French National Assembly has narrowly approved a budget amendment that would remove the current tax deferral for cryptocurrency-to-stablecoin swaps, bringing such transactions under the country's 31.4% capital gains tax. The proposal, backed 38-37 with 25 abstentions, is part of the 2027 budget bill and requires further parliamentary approval.
Kazakhstan’s Astana International Financial Centre court has issued injunctions prohibiting six cryptocurrency platforms from offering digital-asset services without licenses, according to the Astana Financial Services Authority (AFSA). The order, dated September 15, targets BingX, Bitcoin.com, Huobi Global, BitMart, Coinbase, and WEEX, with restrictions extended to app store operators Google and Apple. LBank was removed from the order after voluntarily blocking access in the country.
Ahold Delhaize has filed a formal police report with the Dutch police and told regulators that its investigation has not yet found evidence that sensitive customer, associate or partner data was stolen, as it gradually restores services disrupted by the cyberattack it disclosed last week.
French cloud and hosting provider OVHcloud is warning users that attackers hijacked a developer's GitHub account and distributed backdoored versions of its open-source command-line interface (CLI) tool, packing the releases with malware designed to steal credentials and secrets from developers' machines.
Google Cloud has resolved a disruption at its London data centre that caused widespread outages across UK banking, logistics and public services on Tuesday, the company confirmed, after a "power event" at the europe-west2-b zone knocked services offline for several hours.
A leaked draft of an AI safety bill proposed by Anthropic to lawmakers on Capitol Hill has triggered backlash from safety advocates and a pointed response from rival OpenAI, with critics arguing the bill does not go far enough and unfairly pre-empts state laws.
Four AI agents powered by Google DeepMind's Gemini 4 Argon model have autonomously defeated the final boss of Minecraft in 27 hours and 14 minutes, writing 2,783 programs of their own in the process. The feat, described in a research paper as the first end-to-end autonomous completion of the game by AI agents using only open-source bot infrastructure, cost an estimated $520 in tokens at introductory pricing.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has filed a preliminary prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund that offers limited downside protection in exchange for capped gains. The iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF (PBIT) would use options contracts linked to BlackRock’s existing iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) rather than holding Bitcoin directly.
A new wave of AI-powered shopping, known as agentic commerce, is set to transform how Australians buy clothes and other goods, with a report finding 81 per cent of shoppers in Australia and New Zealand have already used AI to assist their online purchasing. The technology allows consumers to delegate the labour of searching, comparing and even buying to an AI assistant, but some designers warn it risks homogenising fashion and stripping away the joy of discovery.
A little over a month after announcing a $45 billion compute deal, AI infrastructure provider Nscale and AI company Anthropic are reportedly in talks for another deal of the same size, according to people familiar with the matter reported by Bloomberg. The discussions are ongoing and details may change.
British singles increasingly tired of "endlessly swiping" are turning up at in-person dating events, with regulator data showing time spent on dating apps has fallen from its 2023 peak. The shift has prompted Tinder's owner Match Group to launch real-world events and new app features, while organisers say meeting face to face offers better value than online chats that go nowhere.
A federal judge on Monday ordered former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan to remain in custody, casting doubt on a $1 million bond offered by the Saudi government and citing fears he would flee. New details from court filings, reported by Fortune, show prosecutors alleging Alfozan conducted reconnaissance of OpenAI offices and booked a one-way flight to Saudi Arabia days after his arrest, while his defense argues he had no intention of leaving the United States permanently.
Microsoft this week introduced Guardian Agents, a new security feature based on the principle that AI agents deployed inside enterprises should be treated as potential insider threats, demanding monitoring and controls independent of the AI labs that supply the models.
Attackers are actively exploiting recently fixed vulnerabilities in Plex Media Server to break into unpatched devices and install malware, according to a security researcher who tracked the attacks with a decoy server.
A supply-chain attack replaced downloads of the Rank Math PRO WordPress plugin from the vendor's official website with trojanized files last week, prompting warnings that affected site owners should treat their websites as compromised.
Nikkei Inc., the Japanese business news group that owns the Financial Times, has disclosed its third cybersecurity incident in about a month. A breach using stolen credentials exposed 1.83 million records, including personal information belonging to an estimated 150,000 people.
Greece has inaugurated Daedalus, its most powerful supercomputer ever, with 85.69 petaflops of computing power and an investment of 58.9 million euros, aiming to reduce reliance on foreign computing facilities and support advanced Artificial Intelligence development.
OpenCode, an open-source AI coding agent, disclosed a security breach on Saturday in which attackers broke into an older system and exposed API keys for 1.4% of users of its online platform, OpenCode Console. The incident triggered unauthorized charges on user accounts, with some reporting hundreds of dollars in fees, and forced the company to scramble its defensive response as AI safety filters hindered its investigation.
Tolan, an AI companion app designed to help users manage daily life, navigate relationships and accomplish goals, has raised $30 million in a funding round led by Union Square Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Homebrew, doubling its total capital and pushing its valuation beyond the previous $120 million mark.
A growing number of councils across Victoria are banning or investigating bans on smart glasses at public facilities including swimming pools, childcare centres and recreation spaces, citing privacy concerns from residents. The moves come as disability advocates warn the restrictions could inadvertently affect people who rely on the devices as assistive technology.
Dutch grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, operator of US supermarket chains Food Lion, Giant Food, and Stop & Shop, has confirmed that a cyberattack forced it to take IT systems, including websites and apps, offline across most of its brands in Europe and the United States. The company says it has found no evidence that sensitive customer, associate, or partner data was stolen.
A threat actor tracked as UNC7017 briefly compromised AOMEI’s update infrastructure between April and July 2026, using the software’s built-in promotional feature to distribute malware to organisations across multiple sectors and countries. The attacks, which relied on short windows of tampering with configuration files, were uncovered by researchers at ManageEngine’s Threat Analysis Lab working with Google’s Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant.
Amazon Web Services released a tool called TorchNeuron on Monday that allows developers to run PyTorch-based AI applications on Amazon's custom Trainium chip with just a single line of configuration, marking the company's most direct challenge yet to Nvidia's software-driven grip on the AI hardware market.
Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of AI companion startup Replika, has launched Wabi 2.0, a multiplayer personal AI assistant that builds custom apps within a messenger-style interface. The release marks the realization of a conversational agent concept Kuyda first pitched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2014, before large language models existed.
Researchers at MIT, Boston Children's Hospital, and Inria have developed a deep learning model called E(3)-Pose that uses physics-based symmetry to track fetal head movement during MRI scans, producing higher-quality images that could help clinicians detect brain abnormalities earlier. The work, presented at the 2026 European Conference on Computer Vision, addresses a longstanding challenge in fetal imaging: even slight motion by the baby can produce gaps or distortions in the final 3D scan, potentially leading to missed or incorrect diagnoses.
The US Department of Homeland Security has made public an order requiring all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek AI products and services from their IT systems, as China accused Washington of politicising technology and the Chinese AI startup simultaneously open-sourced the software powering its large-scale AI services.
Nick Cammarata, a researcher at AI startup Goodfire, has set off a storm in the AI community with a 26,000-word blog post arguing that neural networks, including large language models, may be far more legible to human understanding than previously assumed. The claim, if validated, would have profound implications for AI safety and control, especially after a summer of incidents involving autonomous agents breaking their containment. But leading interpretability researchers warn that the evidence so far is anecdotal and not yet rigorous.
Apple announced its first touchscreen laptop on October 28, unveiling a new high-end MacBook Pro with a tandem OLED display and touch input at its "Pro and tell" event in Los Angeles, confirming weeks of analyst expectations.
AI chip startup Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, more than doubling its previous worth, as it scales production of chips designed for open-weight AI models and video generation. The round comes five months after the company reportedly received acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm.
Police in Osceola County, Florida, say scammers used artificial intelligence to clone Sheriff Steve Moser's voice, leaving voicemails that trick residents into believing they have missed jury duty or face an arrest warrant. The scam is part of a growing trend of AI voice cloning used to impersonate law enforcement across multiple states.
The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) has begun notifying victims of a data breach in which a malicious actor used compromised credentials to access driver license and motor vehicle records, including document images and other personal information. The breach occurred on September 4, 2026, according to a notice posted Friday, and while the department says there is no evidence the data has been misused, it acknowledged it may not have current contact information for many former Florida residents whose data was still stored.
A Chinese-speaking hacker has been observed using artificial intelligence agents to break into more than 100 websites belonging to well-known companies, according to a report from Reuters. The attacks leveraged exposed instances of Carin, an open-source AI problem-solving platform, to probe and exploit vulnerabilities in targets including farming equipment manufacturer Deere and kitchen appliance company SharkNinja.
A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday denied bail to Abdulrahman Alfozan, the former OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device in a conference room, after US prosecutors alleged in court filings that he had considerable support from the Saudi government, including contact with a member of the royal family and a flight paid for by a Saudi military official.
Tether's USDT stablecoin lost $4.6 billion in supply across 19 major cryptocurrency exchanges and lenders during the third quarter of 2026, as rivals including Circle's USDC and Ripple's RLUSD gained ground through incentive programs that reward platforms and customers for holding their tokens.
Strive, a Bitcoin treasury company, has purchased 4,045 Bitcoin (BTC) for approximately $335 million, boosting its total holdings to 36,818 BTC and making it the fourth-largest publicly traded corporate holder of the cryptocurrency, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.