LEGO Mindstorms, PlayStation 2 and Furby all resonate today in their own way Column Twenty-five years ago this month I published a book called The Playful World that explored a simple idea: that the seeds of the future can be found in the present by considering the dazzling toys we started giving our children at the turn of the millennium.

On the same day that fellow Chinese giant Tencent says its overseas cloud clientele doubled Chinese tech giant Huawei has kicked off its annual Connect conference by laying out a plan to deliver increasingly powerful AI processors that look to have enough power that Middle Kingdom users wont need to try getting Nvidia parts across the border.

As old-school virtual desktop player Omnissa distances itself further from VMware Microsoft thinks cloudy PCs might be overkill for some users, so has started streaming individual apps instead as part of its Windows 365 service.

It's worst when going over older code, one user tells us AI coding service Replit is in trouble again as users are protesting steep cost increases and some glitches when employing the newest version of its service.

Huawei or another, we're gonna getcha off Nvidia Nvidia has reportedly been cut off from the Chinese market after regulators in Beijing ordered the nation's top tech companies to suspend testing and cancel orders of the GPU giant's accelerators.

As the Trump administration guts efforts to counter election disinfo The Russian troll farm that in the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election posted a bizarro video claiming Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was a rhino poacher, is back with hundreds of new fake news websites serving up phony political commentary with an AI assist.

House of Zen promises 3.5x improvement in inference and 3x uplift in training perf over last-gen software AMD closed the performance gap with Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators with the launch of the MI355X this spring. Now the company just needs to overcome Nvidia's CUDA software advantage and make that perf more accessible to developers.

You didn't really trust the crims to keep their word, did you? Spiders don't change their stripes. Despite gang members' recent retirement claims, Scattered Spider hasn't exited the cybercrime business and instead has shifted focus to the financial sector, with a recent digital intrusion at a US bank.

Carefully crafted response makes no mention of whether DOGE employees duplicated critical database The Social Security Administration (SSA) has disputed a whistleblower's allegations that claimed DOGE made an unauthorized, unsecured copy of a critical database - but it's what the denial doesn't say that speaks volumes.

Crew will have to wait a little longer for science supplies, spares, and 'fun food' NASA has delayed a supply delivery to the International Space Station (ISS) after the engines of Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft did not perform as expected during an orbit-raising burn.

American businesses join Win 10 upgrade train, consumers happy to sit on the platform World War Fee The US PC industry is suffering from inventory indigestion caused by resellers over-ordering hardware to avoid Donald Trump's expected import taxes on China-made kit.

But will the International Space Station still be there to host its node? Axiom Space and Spacebilt have announced plans to add optically interconnected Orbital Data Center (ODC) infrastructure to the International Space Station (ISS).

And we're paying for it piecemeal through the software, services, and devices we buy Tech analysts expect worldwide spending on AI to hit nearly $1.5 trillion in 2025, including $268 billion on optimized servers. These investments will also soon appear in even more consumer products.

Insiders say AI trials involving 'critical network services' underway and some engineering roles being moved to India Exclusive Sky Group, the Brit-based commercial TV and broadband service slinger owned by Comcast, is chopping up to 600 employees from the Technology, Consumer Group and COO divisions in the UK.

Even a wrong answer is right some of the time AI models often produce false outputs, or "hallucinations." Now OpenAI has admitted they may result from fundamental mistakes it makes when training its models.

Jared Spataro, boss of modern work and biz apps division, says 'hard to make the ROI argument for it' A Microsoft exec claims Copilot is boosting productivity among the customers that adopted it yet sustained efforts to convince many them of the returns on investment remains a work in progress.

But efforts to simplify popular programming language for beginners are unlikely to boost popularity Oracle has released JDK (Java Development Kit) 25, the first long term support (LTS) version since JDK 21 two years ago. New features include beginner-friendly compact source files, succinct module impor

Prosecutors say Conor Fitzpatrick's crimes caused 'incalculable' damage The founder of the popular cybercrime website BreachForums will spend three years in prison after previously being let off with a slap on the wrist.

Pentesters confirm key system is safe but core products remain unavailable Brit telco Colt Technology Services says its recovery from an August cyberattack might not be completed until late November.

Redmond woos Blighty with cloud and AI infrastructure splurge as Trump comes to town Microsoft appears to have trumped Google's UK datacenter ambitions with a $15 billion investment in cloud and AI infrastructure in the country.

Screw-up or conspiracy? Lurking within the Windows Bluetooth stack is a hardcoded reference to the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. Is this nostalgic favoritism from Microsoft? Or is it just somebody, somewhere, making a mistake that an engineer had to work around?

Officials say there's no time to switch suppliers if they want the PNC off life support before March 2026 The Home Office is flinging nearly 40 million in taxpayer cash at PA Consulting to get the big-ticket successor to the Police National Computer (PNC) over the finish line.

Nice hardware, shame about the OS COMMENT The Arm-based Surface Laptop 7 was introduced in 2024, followed by an Intel-powered version a few months later. As with much of the Surface line, it's a well-engineered piece of hardware. I needed something that could run off the battery for a full day, wouldn't break the strap of a courier bag or the bank, and featured a decent spec.

Still exotic for now, but moves are afoot Arm devices are everywhere today and many of them run Linux. The operating system also powers cloud computing and IT environments all over the world. However, x86 is still the dominant architecture of global computer hardware, where the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) with Secure Boot incorporated is a standard. But what does UEFI look like from an Arm perspective?

Project to get off Google remains a red risk, according to government assessment The Cabinet Office, the strategic center of UK government, has handed a much-delayed project to migrate from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 (M365) to another department.

Google and ETH Zurich found problems with AMD/SK Hynix combo, will probe other hardware Researchers from Google and Swiss university ETH Zurich have found a new class of Rowhammer vulnerability that could allow attackers to access info stored in DDR5 memory.

Suggests using multiple overlapping approaches and being kind to kids who get kicked off Australias eSafety commissioner has told social media operators it expects them to employ multiple age assurance techniques and technologies to keep children under sixteen off social media, as required by local law from December 10th.

Intrusions bear the same hallmarks as recent Nx mess The npm platform is the target of another supply chain attack, with crims already compromising 187 packages and counting.

Tech evolved from PoC to global campaign in under two months An attack called FileFix is masquerading as a Facebook security alert before ultimately dropping the widely used StealC infostealer and malware downloader on Windows machines.

Redmond names alleged ringleader, claims 5K+ creds stolen and $100k pocketed Microsoft has seized 338 websites associated with RaccoonO365 and identified the leader of the phishing service - Joshua Ogundipe - as part of a larger effort to disrupt what Redmond's Digital Crimes Unit calls the "fastest- growing tool used by cybercriminals to steal Microsoft 365 usernames and passwords."

Batteries emit distinct acoustic signatures depending on how they're failing - a bit like people, really When lithium-ion batteries degrade, they emit acoustic signals that reveal what's going wrong inside. Now, MIT researchers say they've figured out how to interpret those sounds, and the subtle creaks and pops that come before major failures, to help predict problems before things go up in smoke.

Talk about an inside job Google confirmed that miscreants created a fraudulent account in its Law Enforcement Request System (LERS) portal, which police and other government agencies use to ask for data about Google users.

250 people now have the chance to sell their freelance services on the site ai-pocalypse Freelance services marketplace Fiverr has told around 250 staffers that they are back on the market as it pivots to having "a modern, clean, AI-focused infrastructure from the ground up."

Mastercard, American Express, Coinbase, and PayPal sign up at launch Google has given the go-ahead to a plan that lets AI agents make purchases on your behalf and, on Tuesday, released its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to make it happen. The system comes with touted safeguards that are intended to prevent thieves from draining bank accounts.

That's optimistic based on progress so far US Energy Secretary Chris Wright believes that the country will have at least one small nuclear rector up and running by July 2026, despite the fact that not a single one has been built to date, after multiple failed attempts.

May have been used in 'extremely sophisticated' attacks against 'specific targeted individuals' Apple backported a fix to older iPhones and iPads for a serious bug it patched last month but only after it may have been exploited in what the company calls "extremely sophisticated" attacks.

Former head of Kubuntu and neon says adis after 25 years Sad news for KDE: one of the core people guiding the project for the whole century so far has left the building.

DSAG players grappling with cloud migration want more consistency with commercial models DSAG, the SAP user group for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, has called for greater transparency in cloud licensing to enable the migration and upgrade of on-prem systems to the cloud.

The Microsoft Axman Cometh While Windows 10 might seem to be the biggest casualty as a result of Microsoft's ax-swinging, Office and recent versions of Windows 11 are also set to be chopped.

Safe C++ proposal author claims that 'will not ever work' The C++ standards committee abandoned a detailed proposal to create a rigorously safe subset of the language, according to the proposal's co-author, despite continuing anxiety about memory safety.