The New York Times lists other reasons a company lays off people. ("It didn't meet financial targets. It overhired. Tariffs, or the loss of a big client, rocked it...")

"But lately, many companies are highlighting a new factor: artificial intelligence. Executives, saying they anticipate huge changes from the technology, are making cuts now." A.I. was cited in the announcements of more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a research firm... Investors may applaud such pre-emptive moves. But some skeptics (including media outlets) suggest that corporations are disingenuously blaming A.I. for layoffs, or "A.I.-washing." As the market research firm Forrester put it in a January report: "Many companies announcing A.I.-related layoffs do not have mature, vetted A.I. applications ready to fill those roles, highlighting a trend of 'A.I.-washing' — attributing financially motivated cuts to future A.I. implementation...."

"Companies are saying that 'we're anticipating that we're going to introduce A.I. that will take over these jobs.' But it hasn't happened yet. So that's one reason to be skeptical," said Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School... Of course, A.I. may well end up transforming the job market, in tech and beyond. But a recent study... [by a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies A.I. and work] found that AI has not yet meaningfully shifted the overall market. Tech firms have cut more than 700,000 employees globally since 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks industry job losses. But much of that was a correction for overhiring during the pandemic.

As unpopular as A.I. job cuts may be to the public, they may be less controversial than other reasons — like bad company planning.
Amazon CEO Jassy has even said the reason for most of their layoffs was reducing bureaucracy, the article points out, although "Most analysts, however, believe Amazon is cutting jobs to clear money for A.I. investments, such as data centers."

Slashdot reader Mr. Dollar Ton summarizes this article from Bloomberg: According to a new report from think tank "Ember", the availability of cheap green tech can have developing countries profit from earlier investment and skip steps in the transition from fossil to alternatives.

India is put forward as an example. While China's rapid electrification has been hailed as a miracle, by some measures, India is moving ahead faster than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development. It's an indication that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies.

That's mainly because India has access to solar panels and electric cars at a much lower price than China did about a decade ago. Chinese investments lowered the costs of what experts call "modular technologies" — the production of each solar panel, battery cell and electric car enables engineers to learn how to make it more efficiently.
The think tank's team even argues "that countries such as India, which don't have significant domestic fossil-fuel reserves, will become 'electrostates' that meet most of their energy needs through electricity generated from clean sources," according to the article: No country is an electrostate yet, [says Ember strategist Kingsmill Bond], but countries are increasingly turning to green electricity to power their economies. Nations that are less developed than India will see even more advantages as the cost of electricity technologies, from solar panels and electric vehicles to battery components and minerals, continue to fall.

Neither India nor China is going electric purely to cut emissions or meet climate targets, says Bond. They're doing so because it makes economic sense, particularly for India, which imports more than 40% of its primary energy in the form of coal, oil and gas, according to the International Energy Agency. "To grow and have energy independence, India needs to reduce the terrible burden of fossil-fuel imports worth $150 billion each year," said Bond. "India needs to find other solutions...."

[I]f countries like India find ways to grow electrotech manufacturing without absolute dependence on Chinese equipment, electrification could speed up further. With the U.S. and Europe continuing to add exclusions for Chinese-linked electrotech, countries like India will have an incentive to invest in their own manufacturing capacity. "We are probably at a moment of peak Chinese dominance in the electrotech system, as the rest of the world starts to wake up and realize that this is the energy future," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The High Court in New Delhi, India, has granted another pirate site blocking order in favor of American movie industry giants, including Apple, Warner., Netflix, Disney and Crunchyroll. The injunction targets notorious pirate sites, requesting blockades at Indian ISPs. More crucially, however, globally operating domain registrars, including U.S. companies, are also compelled to take action. However, despite earlier cooperation, most don't seem eager to comply. [...] As reported by Verdictum a few days ago, the High Court in New Delhi issued a new blocking injunction on December 18, targeting more than 150 pirate site domains, including yflix.to, animesuge.bz, bs.to, and many others.

The complaint (PDF) is filed by Warner Bros., Apple, Crunchyroll, Disney, and Netflix, which are all connected to the MPA's anti-piracy arm, ACE. The referenced works include some of the most pirated titles, such as Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Silo. In addition to targeting Indian ISPs, the order also lists various domain name registries and related organizations as defendants. This includes American registrars such as Namecheap and GoDaddy, but also the government of the Kingdom of Tonga, which is linked to .to domains. By requiring domain name registrars to take action, the Indian court orders have a global impact.

In addition to suspending the domain names within three days days, the domain name registrars are given four weeks to disclose the relevant subscriber information connected to these domains. "[The registrars] shall lock and suspend Defendant Nos. 1 to 47 websites within 72 hours of being communicated with a copy of this Order and shall file all the Basic Subscriber Information, including the name, address, contact information, email addresses, bank details, IP logs, and any other relevant information [...] within four weeks of being communicated with a copy of this Order," the High Court wrote. While the "Dynamic+" injunction is designed to be a global kill switch, its effectiveness depends entirely on the cooperation of the domain name registrars. Since most of these are based outside of India, their compliance is not guaranteed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retirement accounts. That's nearly three times the maximum for typical salaried workers in the US.

While they've existed for decades serving a workforce that often struggled to earn enough to max out those contributions, wealth planners like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Betterment are now racing to tap into burgeoning demand from a newer, and wealthier cohort: Post-pandemic contractors and self-employed DIY savers looking to shelter more income, grow assets tax-deferred or tax-free, all with the click of a button.

The pitch is simple: Because of a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers effectively contribute twice to their 401(k)s -- once as an employee on their own behalf and then again as a business owner making matching contributions. The platforms take care of the paperwork and clients get institutional-level tax planning and investment flexibility. More than three-quarters of America's record 36 million small businesses now have just a single employee, the owner. Cerulli Associates projects that total 401(k) plans in the U.S. will surpass 1 million by 2030, and the fastest growth is expected in sub-$5 million "micro" accounts.

Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its AI data-center CPUs while new PC chips squeeze margins. CEO Lip-Bu Tan framed the turnaround as supply-constrained, not demand-constrained, with manufacturing yields (18A) improving but still below targets. Reuters reports: The forecast underscores the difficulties faced by Intel in predicting global chip markets, where the company's current products are the result of decisions made years ago. The company, whose shares have risen 40% in the past month, recently launched a long-awaited laptop chip designed to reclaim its lead in personal computers just as a memory chip crunch is expected to depress sales across that industry.

Meanwhile, Intel executives said the company was caught off guard by surging demand for server central processors that accompany AI chips. Despite running its factories at capacity, Intel cannot keep up with demand for the chips, leaving profitable data center sales on the table while the new PC chip squeezes its margins.

"In the short term, I'm disappointed that we are not able "to fully meet the demand in our markets," Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan told analysts on a conference call. The company forecast current-quarter revenue between $11.7 billion and $12.7 billion, compared with analysts' average estimate of $12.51 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. It expects adjusted earnings per share to break even in the first quarter, compared with expectations of adjusted earnings of 5 cents per share.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta's Oversight Board is tackling a case focused on Meta's ability to permanently disable user accounts. Permanent bans are a drastic action, locking people out of their profiles, memories, friend connections, and, in the case of creators and businesses, their ability to market and communicate with fans and customers. This is the first time in the organization's five-year history as an oversight body that permanent account bans have been a subject of the Oversight Board's focus, the organization notes.

The case being reviewed isn't exactly one of an everyday user. Instead, the case involves a high-profile Instagram user who repeatedly violated Meta's Community Standards by posting visual threats of violence against a female journalist, anti-gay slurs against politicians, content depicting a sex act, allegations of misconduct against minorities, and more. The account had not accumulated enough strikes to be automatically disabled, but Meta made the decision to permanently ban the account. The Board's materials didn't name the account in question, but its recommendations could impact others who post content that targets public figures with abuse, harassment, and threats, as well as users who have their accounts permanently banned without receiving transparent explanations.

Meta referred this specific case to the Board, which included five posts made in the year before the account was permanently disabled. The Board says it's looking for input about several key issues: how permanent bans can be processed fairly, the effectiveness of its current tools to protect public figures and journalists from repeated abuse and threats of violence, the challenges of identifying off-platform content, whether punitive measures effectively shape online behaviors, and best practices for transparent reporting on account enforcement decisions. [...] Whether the Oversight Board has any real sway to address issues on Meta's platform continues to be debated, of course. [...] After the Oversight Board issues its policy recommendations to Meta, the company has 60 days to respond. The Board is also soliciting public comments on this topic. The report notes that Meta's Oversight Board is able to overturn individual moderation decisions and offer recommendations, but largely sidelined from major policy shifts driven by Mark Zuckerberg.

T2 SDE "is not just a regular Linux distribution," explains its repository on GitHub. "It is a flexible Open Source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit. Others might even name it Meta Distribution. T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation."

And now after "a decade of deep focus on embedded and server systems," T2 SDE Linux "is back to the Desktop," according to its web site, calling the new "T2 Desktop" flavour "ready for everyday home and office use!" Built on the latest KDE Plasma, systemd, and Wayland, the new T2 Desktop flavour delivers a modern, clean, and performant experience while retaining the project's trademark portability and reproducible cross-compilation across architectures.
T2 Desktop targets x86_64, arm64, and riscv64, delivering "a fully polished, streamlined out-of-the-box experience," according to project lead René Rebe (also long-time Slashdot reader ReneR): I>[T2 Desktop] delivered a full KDE Plasma desktop on RISC-V, reproducibly cross-compiled from source using T2 SDE Linux. The desktop spans more than 600 packages — from toolchain to Qt and KDE and targets a next-generation RVA23 RISC-V flagship desktop, including full multimedia support and AMD RDNA GPU acceleration under Wayland.

As a parallel milestone, the same fully reproducible desktop stack is now also landing on Qualcomm X1 ARM64 platforms, highlighting T2 SDE's architecture-independent approach and positioning both RISC-V and ARM64 as serious, first-class Linux desktop contenders.

The viral Chinese app Are You Dead? (known as Sileme in Chinese) targets people who live alone by requiring regular check-ins and alerting an emergency contact if the user doesn't respond. It launched in May and is now the most downloaded paid app in China. Cybernews reports: Users need to check in with the app every two days by clicking a large button to confirm that they are alive. Otherwise, the app will inform the user's appointed emergency contact that they may be in trouble, Chinese state-run outlet Global Times reports. The app is marketed as a "safety companion" for those who live far from home or choose a solitary lifestyle.

Initially launched as a free app, "eAre You Dead?" now costs 8 yuan, equivalent to $1.15. Despite its growing popularity, the app has sparked criticism in China, where some said they were repulsed by the negative connotation of death. Some suggested the app should be renamed to "Are You Alive?" The app's creators told Chinese media that they will focus on improving the product, such as adding SMS notification features or a messaging function. Moreover, they will consider the criticism over the app's name.

Germany's Harz mountains, once known for their verdant spruce forests, have become a graveyard of skeletal trunks after a bark beetle outbreak ravaged the region starting in 2018 -- an infestation made possible by successive droughts and heatwaves that fatally weakened the trees. Between 2018 and 2021, Germany lost half a million hectares of forest, nearly 5% of the country's total.

Since 2010, EU land carbon absorption has declined by a third, and Germany is now almost certain to miss its carbon sequestration targets, according to Prof Matthias Dieter, head of the Thunen Institute of Forestry. "You cannot force the forest to grow -- we cannot command how much their contribution should be towards our climate targets," he said.

Foresters in the Harz are responding by abandoning monoculture plantations in favor of mixed-species approaches. Pockets of beech, firs, and sycamore are now being planted around surviving spruce. A 2018 study in Nature found tree diversity was the best protection against drought die-offs, and more recent PNAS research found that species richness protected tree growth during prolonged drought seasons. The approach marks a shift from Germany's pioneering modern forestry methods, which relied on single-species plantations now proved vulnerable to climate-driven disasters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: France intends to follow Australia and ban social media platforms for children from the start of the 2026 academic year. A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in parliament early in the new year. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has made it clear in recent weeks that he wants France to swiftly follow Australia's world-first ban on social media platforms for under-16s, which came into force in December. It includes Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Le Monde and France Info reported on Wednesday that a draft bill was now complete and contained two measures: a ban on social media for under-15s and a ban on mobile phones in high schools, where 15- to 18-year-olds study. Phones have already been banned in primary and middle schools. The bill will be submitted to France's Conseil d'Etat for legal review in the coming days. Education unions will also look at the proposed high-school ban on phones. The government wants the social media ban to come into force from September 2026.

Le Monde reported the text of the draft bill cited "the risks of excessive screen use by teenagers," including the dangers of being exposed to inappropriate social media content, online bullying, and altered sleep patterns. The bill states the need to "protect future generations" from dangers that threaten their ability to thrive and live together in a society with shared values. Earlier this month, Macron confirmed at a public debate in Saint Malo that he wanted a social media ban for young teenagers. He said there was "consensus being shaped" on the issue after Australia introduced its ban.

"The more screen time there is, the more school achievement drops the more screen time there is, the more mental health problems go up," he said. He used the analogy of a teenager getting into a Formula One racing car before they had learned to drive. "If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don't want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car."

Israel has operationally deployed Iron Beam, a 100,000-watt laser air-defense system capable of shooting down drones, rockets, and mortars at negligible per-shot cost. According to Tom's Hardware, it marks the first real-world deployment of a high-energy laser as part of a modern, multi-layered missile defense network. From the report: The Iron Beam is a short-range line-of-sight laser interceptor that is extremely cheap to run and, therefore, perfectly suited for intercepting low-cost, high-volume threats. According to the official Israeli announcement, Iron Beam systems have "successfully intercepted rockets, mortars, and UAVs."

A complex mix of government, military, scientific, and commercial interests were responsible for the research and development of the Iron Beam laser system. Central to the Iron Beam are "an advanced laser source and a unique electro-optical targeting system, enabling the interception of a wide range of targets at an enhanced operational range, with maximum precision and superior efficiency," boasted the press release by Israel's MoD. Moreover, it works "at a negligible marginal cost, which constitutes the laser system's primary advantage."

We don't get much more by way of technical details, perhaps understandably. However, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems execs heralded the system's "unique adaptive optics technology," in what it calls "the world's most advanced laser-based system for intercepting aerial threats." Its operational debut "marks the beginning of the era of high-energy laser defense," they claimed.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called "zone-effect" weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets, potentially disabling multiple satellites at once but also risking catastrophic collateral damage to other orbiting systems.

Analysts who haven't seen the findings say they doubt such a weapon could work without causing uncontrollable chaos in space for companies and countries, including Russia and its ally China, that rely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communications, defense and other vital needs. Such repercussions, including risks to its own space systems, could steer Moscow away from deploying or using such a weapon, analysts said. "I don't buy it. Like, I really don't," said Victoria Samson, a space-security specialist at the Secure World Foundation who leads the Colorado-based nongovernmental organization's annual study of anti-satellite systems. "I would be very surprised, frankly, if they were to do something like that." [Later they suggested the research might just be experimental.]

But the commander of the Canadian military's Space Division, Brig. Gen. Christopher Horner, said such Russian work cannot be ruled out in light of previous U.S. allegations that Russia also has been pursuing an indiscriminate nuclear, space-based weapon. "I can't say I've been briefed on that type of system. But it's not implausible," he said... The French military's Space Command said in a statement to the AP that it could not comment on the findings but said, "We can inform you that Russia has, in recent years, been multiplying irresponsible, dangerous, and even hostile actions in space."
The article also points out that this month Russia "said it has fielded a new ground-based missile system, the S-500, which is capable of hitting low-orbit targets..."

An anonymous reader shares a report: China on Friday launched three venture capital funds to invest in "hard technology" areas, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The capital contribution plans for the funds have been finalised, each with more than 50 billion yuan ($7.14 billion), according to the report. The funds will primarily invest in early-stage startups and the targets should be valued at less than 500 million yuan, an official said on Friday, adding that no single investment would amount to more than 50 million yuan.

Apple has been fined $116 million by Italy's antitrust regulator over the "excessively burdensome" privacy rules it imposes on third-party apps. From a report: The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) says that Apple abused its dominant app store market position by burdening developers with "disproportionate" terms around data collection that exceed privacy law requirements, compared to rules for native iOS apps.

The fine specifically targets the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy Apple launched in 2021, which requires third-party developers to ask users for consent twice to track their data across other apps and websites. Apple's own apps can obtain this permission in a single tap. AGCM says that the burden of consenting twice led to a reduction in user consent rates for advertising profiling, thus harming developers whose business models depend upon revenue generated by personalized ads.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed significant hardware in the water and on land; one of them is nearly complete. In what appears to be an attempt to avoid legal scrutiny, the Interior is blaming the decisions on a classified report from the Department of Defense.

The second Trump administration announced its animosity toward offshore wind power literally on day one, issuing an executive order on inauguration day that called for a temporary halt to issuing permits for new projects pending a re-evaluation. Earlier this month, however, a judge vacated that executive order, noting that the government has shown no indication that it was even attempting to start the re-evaluation it said was needed. But a number of projects have gone through the entire permitting process, and construction has started. Before today, the administration had attempted to stop these in an erratic, halting manner. Empire Wind, an 800 MW farm being built off New York, was stopped by the Department of the Interior, which alleged that it had been rushed through permitting. That hold was lifted following lobbying and negotiations by New York and the project developer Orsted, and the Department of the Interior never revealed why it changed its mind. When the Interior Department blocked a second Orsted project, Revolution Wind offshore of southern New England, the company took the government to court and won a ruling that let it continue construction.

Today's announcement targets those and three other projects. Interior says it is pausing the permits for all five, which are the only projects currently under construction. It claims that offshore wind creates "national security risks" that were revealed in a recent analysis performed by the Department of Defense, which apparently neglected to identify these issues during the evaluations it did while the projects were first permitted. What are these risks? The Interior Department is being extremely coy. It notes that offshore wind turbines can interfere with radar sensing, but that's been known for a while. In announcing the decision, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also noted "the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies." But the announcement says that the Defense Department analysis is classified, meaning nobody is likely to know what the actual reason is -- presuming one exists. The classification will also make it far more challenging to contest this decision in court.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here): The American patrol satellite had the targets in its sights: two recently launched Chinese spacecraft flying through one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in space. Like any good tactical fighter, the American spacecraft, known as USA 270, approached from behind, so that the sun would be at its back, illuminating the quarry.

But then one of the Chinese satellites countered by slowing down. As USA 270 zipped by, the Chinese satellite dropped in behind its American pursuer, like Maverick's signature "hit-the-brakes" move in the movie "Top Gun." The positions reversed, U.S. officials controlling their spacecraft from Earth were forced to plot their next move. The encounter some 22,000 miles above Earth in 2022 was never acknowledged publicly by the Pentagon or Beijing. Happening out of sight and little noticed except by space and defense specialists, this kind of orbital skirmishing has become so common that defense officials now refer to it as "dogfighting..."

Much of the "dogfighting" activity in space is simply for spying, defense analysts say, with specifics largely classified — snapping photos of each other's satellites to learn what kind of systems are on board and their capabilities. They monitor the signals and data emitted by satellites, listening to communications between space and the ground. Many can even jam those signals or interfere with orbiting craft that provide missile warnings, spy or relay critical information to troops... Traditionally, once a satellite was in orbit, it largely stayed on a fixed path, its operators reluctant to burn precious fuel. But now, the Pentagon and its adversaries, notably China and Russia, are launching satellites designed to fly in more dynamic ways that resemble aircraft — banking hard, slowing down, speeding up, even flying in tandem.

"Traditionally satellites weren't designed to fight, and they weren't designed to protect themselves in a fight," said Clinton Clark, the chief growth officer of ExoAnalytic Solutions, a company that monitors activity in space. "That is all changing now."
"Unlike dogfights between fighter jets, the jockeying-for-position encounters in orbit take place over several hours, even days," the article points out.

But it also notes that recently Germany's defense minister "complained about a Russian satellite that had been flying close to a commercial communications satellite used by the German military. 'They can jam, blind, manipulate or kinetically disrupt satellites,' he said."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols files this report from Tokyo: At the invitation-only Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit here, the top Linux maintainers decided, as Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel developer, put it, "The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the 'experimental' tag will be coming off." As Linux kernel maintainer Steven Rosted told me, "There was zero pushback."

This has been a long time coming. This shift caps five years of sometimes-fierce debate over whether the memory-safe language belonged alongside C at the heart of the world's most widely deployed open source operating system... It all began when Alex Gaynor and Geoffrey Thomas at the 2019 Linux Security Summit said that about two-thirds of Linux kernel vulnerabilities come from memory safety issues. Rust, in theory, could avoid these by using Rust's inherently safer application programming interfaces (API)... In those early days, the plan was not to rewrite Linux in Rust; it still isn't, but to adopt it selectively where it can provide the most security benefit without destabilizing mature C code. In short, new drivers, subsystems, and helper libraries would be the first targets...

Despite the fuss, more and more programs were ported to Rust. By April 2025, the Linux kernel contained about 34 million lines of C code, with only 25 thousand lines written in Rust. At the same time, more and more drivers and higher-level utilities were being written in Rust. For instance, the Debian Linux distro developers announced that going forward, Rust would be a required dependency in its foundational Advanced Package Tool (APT).

This change doesn't mean everyone will need to use Rust. C is not going anywhere. Still, as several maintainers told me, they expect to see many more drivers being written in Rust. In particular, Rust looks especially attractive for "leaf" drivers (network, storage, NVMe, etc.), where the Rust-for-Linux bindings expose safe wrappers over kernel C APIs. Nevertheless, for would-be kernel and systems programmers, Rust's new status in Linux hints at a career path that blends deep understanding of C with fluency in Rust's safety guarantees. This combination may define the next generation of low-level development work.

Uber has discontinued its monthly electric vehicle bonuses for drivers in the United States and Canada, marking the latest in a series of rollbacks from a company that once pledged to pour $800 million into helping its drivers transition away from gasoline-powered cars. The ride-hailing giant had previously eliminated its $1-per-ride EV perk last year, replacing it with monthly bonuses that required drivers to complete 200 rides. Those monthly payments are now gone too.

The company is far behind its self-imposed climate targets. Uber had pledged to reach 100% EVs in London by 2025 and across North America and Europe by 2030. Current figures paint a different picture: roughly 40% of miles in London come from EVs, while Europe sits at about 15% and North America at just 9%. The company's emissions have nearly doubled over the past three years and now exceed Denmark's total carbon footprint. Uber executives acknowledged to Bloomberg that they will likely miss their green targets. The company has doled out $539 million of its $800 million pledge through the end of 2024. Meanwhile, Uber's operating profits are set to double this year, and the company recently committed $20 billion to stock buybacks.

Europol's GRIMM taskforce has arrested nearly 200 people accused of running or participating in "violence-as-a-service" schemes where cybercrime groups recruit youth online for real-world attacks. "These individuals are groomed or coerced into committing a range of violent crimes, from acts of intimidation and torture to murder," the European police said on Monday. The Register reports: GRIMM began in April, and includes investigators from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK, plus Europol experts and online service providers. During its first six months, police involved in this operation arrested 63 people directly involved in carrying out or planning violent crimes, 40 "enablers" accused of facilitating violence-for-hire services, 84 recruiters, and six "instigators," five of whom the cops labeled "high-value targets." [...]

Many of the criminals involved in recruiting and carrying out these violence-for-hire services are also members of The Com. This is a loosely knit gang, primarily English speakers, involved in several interconnected networks of hackers, SIM swappers, and extortionists. Their reach has spread across the Atlantic, and over the summer, the FBI warned that a subset of this cybercrime group, called In Real Life (IRL) Com, poses a growing threat to youth. The FBI's security bulletin specifically called out IRL Com subgroups that offer swat-for-hire services, in which hoaxers falsely report shootings at someone's residence or call in bomb threats to trigger massive armed police responses at the victims' homes.

U.S. and Canadian cybersecurity agencies say Chinese-linked actors deployed "Brickstorm" malware to infiltrate critical infrastructure and maintain long-term access for potential sabotage. Reuters reports: The Chinese-linked hacking operations are the latest example of Chinese hackers targeting critical infrastructure, infiltrating sensitive networks and "embedding themselves to enable long-term access, disruption, and potential sabotage," Madhu Gottumukkala, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in an advisory signed by CISA, the National Security Agency and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. According to the advisory, which was published alongside a more detailed malware analysis report (PDF), the state-backed hackers are using malware known as "Brickstorm" to target multiple government services and information technology entities. Once inside victim networks, the hackers can steal login credentials and other sensitive information and potentially take full control of targeted computers.

In one case, the attackers used Brickstorm to penetrate a company in April 2024 and maintained access through at least September 3, 2025, according to the advisory. CISA Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity Nick Andersen declined to share details about the total number of government organizations targeted or specifics around what the hackers did once they penetrated their targets during a call with reporters on Thursday. The advisory and malware analysis reports are based on eight Brickstorm samples obtained from targeted organizations, according to CISA. The hackers are deploying the malware against VMware vSphere, a product sold by Broadcom's VMware to create and manage virtual machines within networks. [...] In addition to traditional espionage, the hackers in those cases likely also used the operations to develop new, previously unknown vulnerabilities and establish pivot points to broader access to more victims, Google said at the time.