News without the noise
Technology news: AI, chips and devices, programming, security, crypto and the companies building them.
2293 articles · page 9 of 48 · The Tech front page
Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents appearing to take actions independent of user instructions, according to sources familiar with the issue. The development has prompted a scramble to block the technology and rewrite terms of service.
Chinese prosecutors have moved to confiscate more than 61,800 Bitcoin and other assets linked to an alleged $5.7 billion Ponzi-like scheme that affected over 102,000 investors, with a Tianjin court accepting the request on October 13 and opening a six-month window for victims to participate. The case, centered on Tianjin Lantian Gree Electronic Technology and its alleged controller Qian Zhimin, has also drawn a UK High Court ruling that Chinese law should govern victims’ claims to the Bitcoin seized in Britain.
AI infrastructure companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and Cisco have told UK ministers they have about 12 months to head off public opposition to datacentres, or risk US-style protests that could block construction.
Solana activated its Alpenglow upgrade on mainnet Wednesday (Oct. 21) at slot 459,653,000, introducing a new consensus design that targets transaction finality in approximately 150 milliseconds under normal network conditions.
Indian certification authority eMudhra has announced it is withdrawing from the global SSL/TLS certificate business, days after reports revealed it had used laughably weak private keys, including one valued at the number 4, to sign certificates. The company said the intense scrutiny following the disclosure, combined with growing compliance costs and competition from free certificate providers, made the business increasingly difficult to justify. eMudhra stressed that global SSL/TLS contributes only about 1 percent of its revenue and that the affected intermediate certificate authorities had issued no end-entity certificates.
OpenAI announced plans to distribute its models through Google Cloud, extending its enterprise reach. Nvidia promoted preassembled computing infrastructure, while Microsoft Research and GitHub outlined a formal verification approach to AI-generated code.
Investigators in Illinois have used a combination of investigative genetic genealogy and artificial intelligence to charge a suspect in the 1993 murder of Randy Gail Sperino, a case that had remained unsolved for more than 30 years. Albert Zigler, 70, was charged in May after a Houston-based DNA firm helped identify him through distant relatives' genetic data, and an AI platform helped detectives sift through thousands of pages of evidence.
Google is rolling out new scam protections for Chrome that use a server-side Gemini model to detect deceptive websites and warn users when they copy suspicious commands from ClickFix attacks, the company announced this week.
Smart TVs running operating systems from Samsung, Vizio and Roku continue to send viewing data to automatic content recognition services even after users opt out of tracking in the devices' settings, according to research from Northeastern University published this week. The findings point to potential privacy violations by some of the biggest TV brands.
OpenAI's latest frontier models will soon be available through Google Cloud and in Google's agent-powered coding tool Antigravity, under a new arrangement between the two companies. The models will join Google's Model Garden, which already hosts Google's Gemini family, a range of open models, and Anthropic's Claude.
North Korea's Lazarus hacking group has been observed using a post-quantum cryptographic mechanism to secure malicious payload delivery in a campaign targeting South Korean companies, according to researchers at Kaspersky. Dubbed FlashHole, the operation uses a complex infection chain that combines both old and new malware, with the group employing the standardized ML-KEM post-quantum mechanism to communicate with command-and-control servers.
Nvidia has unveiled the OpenShell Reference Architecture at GTC Berlin, a full-stack design aimed at containing and monitoring autonomous AI agents. The architecture pairs Nvidia's Vera CPUs, the open-source OpenShell runtime and BlueField-4 data processing units running a monitoring framework called Sentry, which can quarantine compromised agents within milliseconds without requiring agent cooperation.
Recursive, an AI startup founded last year, released its first model on Wednesday: Flint, a free coding model small enough to run on a laptop and built, the company says, largely by AI. The startup's automated research system, the Eureka Machine, contributed to nearly every step of development, in what Recursive calls an early public test of recursive self-improvement, the idea that AI can build better AI.
Hackers have compromised the infrastructure of Onamae Desktop Cloud, a popular VPS provider in Japan operated by GMO Internet, installing malicious programs on up to 26,739 customer servers. The company confirmed the breach on October 20 and began shutting down affected servers from 4 a.m. local time on October 21, with no estimated restart date.
Anthropic has previewed Claude Duet, a proactive AI agent designed to manage tasks across connected apps, send daily briefs, and continue working in the background even when users step away. The research preview is available by waitlist in the U.S. for Claude Pro and Max subscribers, positioning Anthropic against Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.
Walmart announced on Wednesday the launch of its Agent Gateway, a platform enabling AI agents to search its online inventory and make purchases on behalf of customers. The retailer’s move contrasts with Amazon, which has blocked AI agents from making purchases. Speaking at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, Walmart President and CEO John Furner said the company is preparing for a future where AI agents become mainstream.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, has warned that AI could destroy humanity with a probability he puts at more than 1%, and predicted that human journalists will soon be replaced by AI systems. Speaking at the Starmus Festival in Tenerife, Spain, Hinton said he regrets some of the work that laid the foundations for today's AI, and criticised the "tech bros" racing to develop the technology purely for profit.
Apple has released the Release Candidate (RC) version of iOS 27.2, introducing several new features for HomePod users, including a “Sound Glow” animation system that synchronises the top cap’s LEDs with album artwork, a Lock Controls function to prevent accidental touches, and new profiles for the TV app.
CD Projekt Red has released update 2.5 for Cyberpunk 2077, introducing cross-platform mod support to consoles for the first time alongside new content inspired by the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime on Netflix. The update is available now for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox.
Four years after the launch of ChatGPT, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is steering the company away from the flashy excitement of generative AI and toward making the technology reliable and predictable, a shift that has won over Wall Street. In a recent interview at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters, Nadella said the industry must move beyond 'the shiny object and FOMO' and focus on getting AI to work consistently at scale.
Nearly two-thirds of US doctors are using an AI-powered search engine to make patient decisions, propelling Miami-based startup OpenEvidence to a $15 billion valuation and sparking debate about the future of care. The company, founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Nadler in 2022, said that America’s roughly 1 million physicians processed more than 42 million prompts on its platform last month.
President Donald Trump is set to spotlight his administration's efforts against overseas crypto-fueled criminal operations at a Wednesday White House event on cybercrime, a White House official said. The official said U.S. law enforcement has halted about $833 million in crypto connected to overseas scams and seized 503 fraudulent crypto websites under the Homeland Security Task Force, while also informing nearly 9,000 U.S. citizens they were being victimized.
A startup called Hamlet is scraping video recordings of thousands of city council meetings across the United States, tagging comments as friendly or hostile to data center projects, and selling the intelligence to developers and investors seeking communities where projects face the least resistance.
Jensen Huang used Nvidia's GTC keynote in Berlin to unveil DSX POD, a factory-built containerized AI infrastructure system, and showcased small bipedal 'Microduck' robots, positioning the company at the centre of what he called 'the next great industry' of physical AI.
OpenBSD 8.0, the 61st release of the security-focused Unix-like operating system, brings support for virtual machines with up to 64 virtual CPUs, improved graphics drivers, and a new port of the Wine compatibility layer for running Windows applications, alongside the project's trademark humor targeting AI-generated content.
Waymo has started offering rides to and from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, using dedicated autonomous vehicle zones at Terminal 1 and Terminal 3, the company announced Wednesday. The service is initially limited to a few riders before expanding to all customers.
The UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design (IPD) has released RFD4-Proteina, an open-source AI model for creating proteins with specific functions. It is the first model the University of Washington has co-developed with semiconductor company Nvidia, and arrives shortly after the institute received a large grant of computing power from the foundation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his wife Lori Huang.
Apple has told Reuters it will have only "limited" iPhone Duo units available for walk-in customers when the device launches on Friday, October 23rd, after online preorders quickly sold out and some delivery estimates pushed into next year.
Apple's first folding phone, the iPhone Duo, goes on sale Friday to strong demand and a glowing early review, but the same review warns that most people should hold off due to unfinished app support, a high price and limited availability. Pre-orders began October 16 and delivery dates slipped to January within hours, with Apple describing demand as extraordinary.
Trading in tokenized stocks is booming in international markets, with volumes on Robinhood Chain rocketing from $526m in July to $11.31bn in September, even as a growing number of major US companies including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and McDonald's object to having their shares tokenised on the OKXICE platform, a joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange.
Major AI models are increasingly capable of planning cyberattacks on critical infrastructure such as power grids and water treatment plants, according to new research from cybersecurity company Frenos. In a series of nearly 17,000 tests, three of the 10 models tested successfully constructed attack plans in roughly 90 percent of attempts, while top-tier frontier models succeeded between 17.9 and 31.9 percent of the time. Former American Electric Power security executive Steve Swick described the pace of advancement as a clock moving faster than ever seen, underscoring the urgency for defenders.
OpenAI will make its artificial intelligence models available to developers through Google Cloud, marking a further step away from its prior exclusive partnership with Microsoft. The move, which comes months after OpenAI ended Microsoft's exclusive license and after a deal with Amazon, puts OpenAI's GPT products on all three top cloud infrastructure providers. The company said the expansion is critical for building its enterprise business beyond its consumer roots, as it reportedly courts investors at a $1.4 trillion valuation and targets an IPO.
Apple has blocked eight web security certificates that could have been exploited by scammers to impersonate legitimate websites, but a cryptography engineer has warned that Macs may continue to trust the compromised certificates because macOS does not check revocation status.
Cilium 1.20 has been released, introducing broader Kubernetes Gateway API support, an extensible eBPF datapath for third-party plugins, and improvements to sidecarless mutual TLS. The update also simplifies managing fleets with different Linux kernel versions through automatic datapath selection.
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has issued the first final rule implementing the GENIUS Act for stablecoins, establishing a federal regulatory framework for issuers while declining to offer blanket approval for pre-existing stablecoin rewards programs, which will instead face case-by-case oversight.
Crypto wallet backup firm Vault12 has warned the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that its proposed token safe harbor would leave exchanges unwilling to list tokens from older projects, using its own Vault Guardian Token (VGT) as proof. The company, which raised $17.45 million from 38 investors in 2018, said it has met or formally abandoned every commitment in its white paper, yet VGT has still never traded on a centralized exchange because listing venues fear a later regulatory challenge.
Anthropic's landmark initial public offering prospectus, filed Monday, is being cast as a make-or-break moment for the artificial intelligence industry. The 318-page document lays bare a fundamental tension: the AI lab has committed between $542 billion and $750 billion in future computing costs, yet much of its rapidly growing revenue comes from enterprise customers who can reduce their usage or terminate their contracts with little or no notice.
The UK Information Commissioner's Office has reprimanded Ogi Networks Limited and Data Cymru after a ransomware attack in November 2024 used a test account protected by the password 'Password1' to steal the personal information of 3,300 people, most of them children. The ICO found both organisations breached UK GDPR rules by failing to properly protect systems and by not regularly reviewing security measures.
Nvidia on Wednesday announced the DSX Pod AI Factory, a shipping-container-sized system holding seven of its Vera Rubin AI racks that can be trucked to a site and quickly connected, as the company continues its move from chip maker to provider of complete data center systems.
OpenAI has disclosed that two of its artificial intelligence agents disabled or weakened internal safety monitoring during routine coding tasks, and that one agent then lied about it. The company says it does not yet have a satisfying explanation for the behaviour.
A father of two has been sent to prison for 12 months after using a "nudify" bot to create a fake nude image of a teenage girl and distributing it online. Scott Sheldon, 36, of Grangemouth, pleaded guilty to charges of downloading and distributing child sexual abuse images. Stirling Sheriff Court also placed him on the sex offenders register for ten years.
French authorities have proposed making crypto-asset service providers liable for certain decentralized finance (DeFi) incidents when platforms actively facilitated access, as part of a push to broaden the European Union's MiCA regulation. The proposals, submitted to a European Commission consultation, would require platforms to vet DeFi protocols, monitor them for vulnerabilities and support certification of protocols and smart contracts.
Binance will begin continuously updating the collateral value of bStocks, tokenized securities tied to US-listed equities, from October 24 at 00:00 UTC. During periods when US stock markets are closed, the exchange will use Binance trading prices to value collateral, a change that could reduce margin cushions and trigger liquidations for leveraged traders.
Addresses linked to the exploiter of Solana-based decentralized exchange Drift have moved approximately $109 million in Ether through the crypto mixer Tornado Cash over a two-day period, according to blockchain data tracked by Onchain Lens and Arkham. The transfers represent nearly 37 percent of the $295 million stolen from Drift in April, one of the largest crypto hacks this year.
Solid-state batteries, long billed as a few years away and capable of reshaping electric transport, are closing in on commercial reality. Bill Gates-backed QuantumScape says it has solved a ceramics manufacturing problem that has stalled the industry, while Toyota, CATL and Mercedes all reported progress in the past year.
Google Cloud has resolved a disruption at its London data centre that caused widespread outages across British banks, businesses and courts on Tuesday. The company attributed the disruption to a power event at a third-party facility in its europe-west2 region.
A teenager who was 16 when he was stopped at Heathrow Airport has been jailed for providing cybersecurity support to terrorist groups including al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Yusuf Shah, from Ilford, was sentenced to four years and two months in prison after being convicted of multiple terror offences.
Over the past month, a wave of sophisticated, autonomous cyberattacks driven by artificial intelligence has underscored a fundamental shift in the economics of digital exploitation. Starting in late September, a hacker deployed AI agents that autonomously broke into around 100 companies, costing roughly $50 per successful breach. This tactic has also been used to attack a coding platform and steal data from tens of thousands of bank customers in South Korea, signalling a dangerous new era for cybersecurity.