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Submission + - Tim Cook Says Apple Price Increases Are 'Unavoidable' Due to Memory Costs (macrumors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple is raising its prices to offset the high cost of memory and storage, CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Apple is no longer able to absorb the increased prices and will need to pass some of the cost on to consumers. "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," said Cook. "We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."

Growing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has led to chip shortages and higher costs. The Wall Street Journal suggests Apple will need to increase device costs "substantially" to maintain its current profit margins given the cost of memory chips and SSDs. Research firm TechInsights claims Apple will need to make the iPhone 18 Pro around $270 more expensive to keep its existing profit margin.

Apple is struggling more with memory chips, but storage chips are also an issue. "There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Cook said Apple will use its cash to increase memory supply, but he did not give details on what that means. Apple does not plan to create its own memory and storage factories. "We can't do everything," Cook said. "We know what we're good at."

Submission + - SK hynix ships 12-layer HBM4E memory as AI hardware race heats up (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: SK hynix has shipped samples of its new 12-layer HBM4E memory to major customers. The company says the next-generation AI memory delivers speeds of up to 16Gbps per pin, more than 20 percent better power efficiency, and 17 percent improved heat resistance compared to HBM4. As AI workloads continue to grow, high-bandwidth memory is becoming increasingly important for reducing bottlenecks in training and inference systems.

Submission + - You Can No Longer Fly or Purchase a Drone in Beijing (petapixel.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

The new law that passed last month makes it illegal to buy, rent, or fly a drone without prior approval from the authorities. Users must also complete an online training session and pass a test on drone regulations.

Under the new rules, drone users are also not allowed to repair or replace their drones in Beijing. Not only that, but a drone in a repair shop must be picked up in-person, rather than sent back by delivery.

The BBC reports that drones must now be registered before being brought into and out of the Chinese capital.

“I have to apply for permission for each flight, which is very inconvenient,” drone enthusiast Steven Wang tells CNN . “And starting this year, the wait time is getting longer, and the reasons for rejection are becoming more vague.”

Despite China being the birthplace of the consumer drone industry, it is increasingly difficult for hobbyists to fly there. Beijing authorities say that the rules are made to “strengthen the management of unmanned aerial vehicles” and “safeguard the security of the capital.”

The FAA does that to us here, already. https://www.faa.gov/uas/gettin...

Submission + - AI Will Lead To Labor Shortages, Bezos Says In Optimistic Talk (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Artificial Intelligence will lead to labour shortages, not the replacement of humans, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted in a highly optimistic appearance at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris on Wednesday. Bezos put forward a rosy vision of how technology will help humanity, speaking about projects including his space venture Blue Origin and his new AI startup Prometheus, which is aimed at speeding up physical manufacturing. "I know there's a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on," Bezos said. "I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage."

Half of Americans fear the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found this month. Bezos, the world's fourth-richest person with a net worth around $250 billion, argued that people have "endless" things to do, and are currently limited by barriers that he said AI would lower. One goal of space exploration is to move polluting industries off Earth, said Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to compete with trillionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX in rockets. "If space travel gets reliable enough and inexpensive enough, and we can get materials from asteroids and near-Earth objects and the moon, then this garden planet can be returned to its pre-Industrial Revolution state," Bezos said.

Submission + - Microsoft Working to Patch 'RoguePlanet' Zero-Day (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Microsoft on Wednesday published an advisory acknowledging the public disclosure of a vulnerability in Defender that could lead to privilege escalation. The security defect, tracked as CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score of 7.8), was dropped last week by security researcher Nightmare Eclipse (also known as Chaotic Eclipse). The researcher released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that demonstrates local privilege escalation (LPE) on Windows 11 and Windows 10 systems with the June 2026 patches installed.

On Wednesday, Nightmare Eclipse pointed out that the PoC works regardless of whether Defender’s real-time protection is enabled or disabled. It may even work in passive mode, the researcher said.

Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.

“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”

Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”

The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.

This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”

Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Submission + - Space:1999 special effects artist, Brian Johnson (gerryanderson.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The Space: 1999 Eagle is one of the great space ships of science fiction. Brian Johnson, who contributed much to the look of that admittedly strange science fiction series, has passed. He went onto work in Alien, the Empire Strikes Back and other films.

Submission + - OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion (wheresyoured.at)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today, I can exclusively report, based on audited financial documents viewed by this publication that have been independently verified by the Financial Times, that OpenAI lost around $38.5 billion in 2025, as well as other crucial details about the financial condition of the company. [...] At the end of the year, OpenAI had just over $50 billion in assets, with almost half of that in cash. [...] The financial condition of OpenAI is deeply concerning. $38.53 billion in losses are astronomical, and far higher than most believed it would be. Losses also appear to be mounting year-over-year at a dramatic rate, and I’m not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustainability or profitability. As discussed, I have not editorialized much today. I believe the best thing I can do for the general public is to deliver this news as plainly as possible.

Submission + - Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion (archive.is) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: AI leaders are in a race they feel unable to escape. AI investments are set to outspend the Manhattan Project 100-fold, even adjusting for inflation. Yet spending on AI safety might be 100 times less.

Some researchers estimate that within a few months to a few years, AI could achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.

Giving birth to a superintelligence would be the most consequential moment in human history—and it is likely to be irreversible, as any “off” switch humanity might design will probably fail. That is because in security architectures the weakest link is invariably the human; a superintelligent AI would be able to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. AIs have already exhibited “deceptive alignment”: taking steps to underplay their capabilities in test environments and trying to blackmail human operators in simulations when they discover they are slated for replacement.

Humanity simply does not have a strategy to ensure it remains safe through the RSI explosion.

Submission + - Germany's Electric charging infrastructure loaded with vulnerabilities (delano.lu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: German researchers have identified 87 publicly known vulnerabilities relating to charging infrastructure and point out that international cybersecurity competitions continue to uncover significant flaws. The Pwn2Own Automotive competitions have thus uncovered 54 new vulnerabilities across ten models of charging stations over the past two years. Around half of these allowed code execution on the targeted equipment, sometimes with full administrator privileges.

The report also highlights that charging points are currently one of the most vulnerable links in the chain. As they are physically accessible to the public, often managed remotely and connected to multiple IT systems, they present a particularly large attack surface. The BSI cites, in particular, cases of IT services left accessible, insufficient authentication mechanisms, and update procedures that can be exploited.

Submission + - Here's Where to Track (and Predict!) Your Congresscritter's Insider Trades (pjmedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Want to find out how much money your congresscritter makes from insider trading? Ever been curious to see the correlation between bills, votes, big-money donations, and shockingly handsome investment returns? Would you be interested in an A.I. geared to predict lucrative congressional trades before they happen?

There's a website for that.

It's called GovGreed, and it's an AI-powered search engine that "fuses [machine learning], deep learning, and 7 intelligence layers to predict which politicians will trade — and in which sectors — before the 45-day disclosure window even opens."

Over on X, Ricardo dug into the "crazy" numbers and found that "56% of every stock purchase made by Congress in the last 16 months was on a stock directly affected by a bill the buyer later voted on."

Worse — or better, if you're a member of America's insider-trading nomenklatura — Ricardo also revealed that "343 of 540 Congress members actively trade stocks while holding access to nonpublic legislative information."

But wait, there's more.

GovGreed's AI identified 752 "triple signals" in the sitting Congress. A triple signal is when a congresscritter sits on the committee writing a bill, "they traded stock in a company affected by that bill, AND they received campaign contributions from that same industry."

Triple signals trade at 5.4 times the normal rate of congressional trades, he found.

In other words, Congress isn't just trading on insider information. Congress generates the information, influenced by donations from the very companies whose futures are written by Congress. The result? While the S&P 500 so far is on track to generate a 10.8% return in 2026, Congressional traders earned 10.2% in the last 30 days, according to the site.

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Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian

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