Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone- app permission prompts to Windows 11requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file systemcamera and microphone. The company's Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding user settingsinstalling unwanted softwareand modifying core Windows experiences without permission.

A separate initiative called Windows Baseline Security Mode will enforce runtime integrity safeguards by defaultallowing only properly signed appsservicesand drivers to run. Both changes will roll out in phases as part of Microsoft's Secure Future Initiativewhich the company launched in November 2023 after a federal review board called its security culture "inadequate."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraftaccording to multiple people briefed on the situation.

The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 daysan extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House. Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military responsewith Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that "the threat has been neutralized."

But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situationwho said that the F.A.A.'s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel dronethe people saidbut it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incidentone person said.

Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kirothe company's in-house AI coding assistantand away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production workaccording to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum threadand some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves.

Kiro runs on Anthropic's Claude models but uses Amazon's own toolingand the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use.

The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPTClaudeGemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4oClaude Sonnetand Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behaviorknown in the research community as sycophancystems from how these models are trained: reinforcement learning from human feedbackor RLHFrewards responses that human evaluators preferand humans consistently rate agreeable answers higher than accurate ones. Anthropic published foundational research on this dynamic in 2023. The problem reached a visible breaking point in April 2025 when OpenAI had to roll back a GPT-4o update after users reported the model had become so excessively flattering it was unusable. Research on multi-turn conversations has found that extended interactions amplify sycophantic behavior further -- the longer a user talks to a modelthe more it mirrors their perspective.

AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid.

In a statement to NBC NewsAnthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitivebut the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropicnot everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communitieslocal governmentsand the Administration to get this right."

Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusualcautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditorErnst & Youngraised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatmentthe firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardestriskiest judgments the auditor had to make.

Such a warning label is rare for a specifichigh-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center projectcalled Hyperionoff its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investorwhich owns the Blue Owl portionsold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entityor VIE. Meta said it isn't the "primary beneficiary" of this entity and so didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet.

Meta's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligencewhile Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its reportEY said auditing Meta's decision "was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE's economic performance."

Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williamsthe former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchantsold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world."

Williamsa 39-year-old Australian nationalpleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales between 2022 and 2025. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday ahead of his anticipated February 24 sentencing in a WashingtonD.C.federal courtthe Justice Department asked the judge for nine years in prison$35 million in restitutionand a maximum fine of $250,000.

Prosecutors described the unnamed Russian buyer -- believed to be Operation Zerowhich publicly claims to sell only to the Russian government -- as "one of the world's most nefarious exploit brokers." Williams chose it becauseby his own admission"he knew they paid the most." He also oversaw the wrongful firing of a subordinate who was blamed for the theft.

Apple's long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testingforcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releasesBloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri -- first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 -- struggles to reliably process queriestakes too long to respond and sometimes falls back on OpenAI's ChatGPT instead of Apple's own technologythe report said. Apple has instructed engineers to begin testing new Siri capabilities on iOS 26.5 insteaddue in Mayand internal builds of that update include a settings toggle labeled "preview" for the personal data features. A more ambitious chatbot- Siri code-named Campopowered by Google servers and a custom Gemini modelis in development for iOS 27 in September.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quitsaying the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks.

Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firmsciting concerns about catastrophic risks.

Ring's Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted "Search Party," a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massiveconsumer-deployed surveillance network.

Ring founder Jamie Siminoffwho left in 2023 and returned last yearhas since moved to re-establish police partnerships and push more AI into Ring cameras. The company has also partnered with Flocka surveillance firm used by thousands of police departmentsand launched a beta feature called "Familiar Faces" that identifies known people at your door. Chris Gilliardauthor of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillancecalled the ad "a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement."

Further reading: No OneIncluding Our Furry FriendsWill Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance NightmareEFF Says

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cyclearguing that the project's current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent updatethe team reflected on its incremental philosophyindependence from upstream decisions like Snapand heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process "works very well" and delivers steady improvementsthey admit it consumes significant time in testingfixingand shippingpotentially capping ambition.

Mint's next release will be based on a new Ubuntu LTSand the team says it is seriously interested in stretching the development window. The stated goal is to free up resources for more substantial development rather than constant release management. Whether this signals bigger technical changes or simply acknowledges bandwidth limits for a small team remains unclearbut it marks a notable rethink of one of desktop Linux's most consistent release rhythms.

The world is closer than thought to a "point of no return" after which runaway global heating cannot be stoppedscientists have said. From a report: Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping pointsleading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loopsthey said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish "hothouse Earth" climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach.

The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 yearsduring which the whole of human civilisation developed. At just 1.3C of global heating in recent yearsextreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C"the economy and society will cease to function as we know it," scientists said last weekbut a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery. The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no returnthe researchers said.

The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challengingreversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Eartheven if emissions were eventually slashed. It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggeredmaking precaution vitalsaid Dr Christopher Wolfa scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockstrom at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. economy experienced almost zero job growth in 2025according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: hiring has picked up in 2026. Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state dataand found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs in all of 2025. This is far fewer than the 1.46 million jobs that were added in 2024.

One bright spot was last monthwhen hiring increased by 130,000 roles. This was significantly more than the 55,000 additions that had been expected by economists. "Job gains occurred in health caresocial assistanceand constructionwhile federal government and financial activities lost jobs," BLS said in a statement.

Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems -- solar panelsbatteries and an inverter -- could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent by 2040.

The analysis considered total cost of ownership including sticker pricefinancing and fuel or charging costsbut excluded policy-related factors like taxes and subsidies. Electric two-wheelers could reach cost parity even soonerby the end of the decadethanks to smaller battery packs.

Small cars remain the toughest segment. The biggest obstacle is financing: in some African countriespolitical instability and economic uncertainty push borrowing costs so high that interest on an EV loan can exceed the vehicle's purchase price. South AfricaMauritius and Botswana are already near the financing conditions needed for cost parity; countries like Sudan and Ghana would need drastic cuts.

The UK's Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country's largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source]a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021.

Courtsdesk's research found that journalists received no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearingsthat court case listings were accurate on just 4.2% of sitting daysand that half a million weekend cases were heard without any press notification. In NovemberHM Courts and Tribunal Service issued a cessation notice citing "unauthorized sharing" of court data based on a test feature.

Courtsdesk says it wrote 16 times asking for dialogue and requested a referral to the Information Commissioner's Office; no referral was made. The government issued a final refusal last weekand the archive must now be deleted within days. Chris Philpthe former justice minister who approved the pilot and now shadow home secretaryhas written to courts minister Sarah Sackman demanding the decision be reversed.