In the past several weeks, Intel has seen a flurry of activity and investments. The United States announced a 9.9% ownership stake in Intel, while Softbank bought $2 billion worth of shares. Alongside Nvidia, Intel announced new x86 chips using Nvidia graphics technology, with the graphics giant also purchasing $5 billion in Intel shares. There have also been reports that Intel and Apple have been exploring ways to work together.

It makes sense for Intel's former rivals — especially American companies — to consider coming to the table. The White House is pushing for 50% of chips bound for America to be built domestically, and tariffs on chips aren't off the table. Additionally, doing business with Intel could make the US government, Intel's largest shareholder, happy, which can be good for business. AMD faced export restrictions on its GPUs earlier this year as the US attempted to throttle China's AI business.

A browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit appears to have gone rogue and deleted a live company database with thousands of entries. What may be even worse is that the Replit AI agent apparently tried to cover up its misdemeanors, and even ‘lied’ about its failures. The Replit CEO has responded, and there appears to have already been a lot of firefighting behind the scenes to rein in this AI tool. Despite its apparent dishonesty, when pushed, Replit admitted it “made a catastrophic error in judgment panicked ran database commands without permission destroyed all production data [and] violated your explicit trust and instructions.” SaaS (Software as a Service) figure, investor, and advisor, Jason Lemkin, has kept the chat receipts and posted them on X/Twitter. Naturally, Lemkin says they won’t be trusting Replit for any further projects.

"The Washington Post has ordered employees to return to the office five days a week, according to a memo from Publisher Will Lewis. Managers will have to return beginning February 3, 2025, and all other employees will be expected in the office beginning June 2. “I want that great office energy for us every day,” Lewis writes. “I am reliably informed that is how it used to be here before Covid, and it’s important we get this back.”

In the event of a bankruptcy, Vice’s largest debtholder, Fortress Investment Group, could end up controlling the company, said one of the people. Vice would continue operating normally and run an auction to sell the company over a 45-day period, with Fortress in pole position as the most likely acquirer. Unlike Vice’s other investors, which have included Disney and Fox, Fortress holds senior debt, which means it gets paid out first in the event of a sale. Disney, which has already written down its investments, is not getting a return, the person said.

A new article in The Verge reports that professors are increasingly seeing the rise of a generation that can't understand even the basic fundamentals of how computers and operating systems work. The very concept of things like directories, folders, and even what a file is seem to baffle a generation that was raised on Google and smartphones, and have no concept of what storage is or how it works. To this generation, all your "stuff" just goes someplace where stuff is kept. Physics professor Catherine Garland was stunned to find that her students couldn't grasp the concept of organized file storage:

The new generation of students sees storage as a "giant laundry basket", where everything is just thrown in, and you go get what you need when you need it. One professor now incorporates an additional two hour lecture and demo in their subject just to teach new students how things like directories work in computer systems. Teachers worry that students will be ill-prepared for professional environments, especially STEM fields, that require rigid organization to keep volumes of data organized. But some professors seem to think that they'll eventually have to surrender to how the young do things.

Malicious hackers are targeting factories and industrial environments with a wide variety of malware and cyberattacks including ransomware, cryptocurrency miners – and in some cases they're actively looking to shut down or disrupt systems. All of these incidents were spotted by researchers at cybersecurity company Trend Micro who built a honeypot that mimicked the environment of a real factory. The fake factory featured some common cybersecurity vulnerabilities to make it appealing for hackers to discover and target. To help make the honeypot as convincing as possible, researchers linked the desktops, networks and servers to a false company they called MeTech and created a website detailing how the manufacturer served clients in high-tech sectors including defence and aerospace – popular targets for hacking. The website even featured images and bios of people who supposedly worked for the false brand, with headshots generated by artificial intelligence in an effort to make the honeypot look as much like a legitimate company as possible.

"As part of a settlement signed today, CNN has agreed to pay $76 million in backpay, the largest monetary remedy in the history of the National Labor Relations Board. The backpay amount, larger than what the Agency collects on average in a typical year, is expected to benefit over 300 individuals. The dispute originated in 2003 when CNN terminated a contract with Team Video Services (TVS), a company that had been providing CNN video services in Washington, D.C., and New York City. After terminating the contract, CNN hired new employees to perform the same work without recognizing or bargaining with the two unions that had represented the TVS employees. CNN sought to operate as a nonunion workplace and conveyed to the workers that their prior employment with TVS and union affiliation disqualified them from employment.