Technology

IT consultant and services provider Accenture has agreed to buy Speedtest and Downdetector owner Ookla from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash.

Accenture plans to integrate Ookla’s data products into its own offerings that are targeted at helping communications service providers, hyperscalers, government entities, and other types of customers “optimize … mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks,” Accenture’s announcement today said.

Ookla’s platform also includes Ekahau, which offers tools for troubleshooting and designing wireless networks, and RootMetrics, which monitors mobile network performance.

Accenture plans to use data gathered from Ookla’s services for applications such as helping hyperscalers and cloud providers “ensure the resilience of AI infrastructure and edge datacenters, which deliver most of the inference workload,” improving fraud prevention in banks, conducting smart home analytics in utilities, and retail traffic optimization.

News Corp’s global chief executive has described news organisations as a valuable “input” for artificial intelligence, as the media empire signs an AI content licensing deal with Meta worth up to US$50m (A$71m) a year.

In an upbeat presentation, the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s company, Robert Thomson, said the “reliable” breaking news and information in publications like the Australian, the Times of London and Dow Jones was “hard to beat” as an “input” for AI.

The Meta deal, which was revealed by the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal earlier this week and is expected to last at least three years, will allow Facebook and Instagram’s parent company to scrape News Corp’s US and UK content to train its artificial-intelligence products.

The outlets include the Journal and the New York Post, but the Australian mastheads, which include the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, are not part of the deal.

“We’re essentially an input company,” Thomson told a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco on Monday ahead of the landmark Meta deal.

Study finds chat bots can sway opinions on historical events
nationaltoday.com/us/wa/seattl…

Originally came across the skit on YouTube, but glad to find it on a different platform for sharing. Kinda funny and too real..

Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.

The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.

The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds.

Hello,

Is there any ethical (Privacy focused) alternative to Canva ?

Edit : Especially for slides creation :)

As Canva is sharing your data and is going to stock exchange this year, I feel very urgent to move out of this service.

Best, H

The hed here is a bit misleading ... 40% of total staff is not 40% of an individual job.

Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind cutting 40% of his company’s employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a declining stock price may also have motivated the move.

Last week, the financial technology company Block announced that it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 workers. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI “have changed what it means to build and run a company”.

“We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week,” he wrote. He also said that Block’s business remained strong and that these cuts weren’t an austerity measure.

Can AI operate 40% of a business? Perhaps, but other specters haunt Dorsey’s company.

I'd be surprised if LLMs can handle 40% of anyone's job. You know what often can? Good, old-fashioned automation. It handles tedious tasks no one wanted to do in the first place and produces improved, predictable and testable results.

Within hours on Friday, the Pentagon blacklisted one AI company for refusing to drop its safety commitments on surveillance and autonomous weapons, then turned around and praised a competitor for signing a deal that supposedly preserved those exact same commitments.

This confused some people. Why would the Pentagon seek to destroy one company over the same terms it agreed to with its largest competitor just hours later?

There’s an answer though: the words in OpenAI’s contract likely don’t mean what most people think they mean.

This isn’t speculation about future abuse. It’s the documented operating procedure of the NSA for decades—a practice exposed repeatedly by whistleblowers, litigated in courts, and eventually confirmed in declassified documents.

archive link

As you’ve probably heard, on Friday that political caprice came home to roost for many in Silicon Valley when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he was declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and that no one with US military contracts could have a commercial relationship with the company any more (a gross exaggeration of what being declared a supply chain risk actually means, but that’s besides the point).

We’ve criticized these “supply chain risk” designations going back years, but mainly for how they tend to be used to prop up American companies against foreign (usually Chinese) competitors with little evidence regarding the actual risk. Of course, you can easily understand the stated intent of an “SCR” designation: if there’s a foreign company with ties to a government that is averse to the US, there is always a risk that the company could agree to sneak backdoors or spyware into the network and do something bad. Hell, it’s what the US does.

But here, it makes no sense at all. The only “risk” was Anthropic saying its technology shouldn’t be used for domestic mass surveillance or to power autonomous killing machines. There is no underlying risk.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43923687

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43923170

We're happy to announce a long-term partnership with Motorola. We're collaborating on future devices meeting our privacy and security standards with official GrapheneOS support.

https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at-mwc-2026/

Amazon says “objects” struck a data center in the UAE, throwing sparks and starting a fire. Almost certainly due to the ongoing war.

Separately, another data center is offline due to a "localized power issue."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/61101616

Absolutely brilliant campaign (in English) by the Norwegian Consumer Council.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk on Friday, following days of increasingly heated public conflict with the AI company.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1826628/openai-strikes-a-deal-with-the-defense-department-to-deploy-its-ai-models

Sam Altman says "the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety."

Not 24 hours ago, he seemed to back Anthropic "supporting our warfighters" as long as two "red lines" weren't crossed, though his tepid support was laden with five instances of "I think" and one "mostly."

The two "red lines" in question:

• Domestic mass surveillance
  (presumably, foreign mass surveillance is ok)
• Autonomous weapons
  (likely because they would be held legally liable for misfires)

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”

The company announced the sackings in the shareholder letter [PDF] accompanying its Q4 earnings announcement on Thursday. The payments and crypto company reported quarterly revenue of about $6.25 billion – up 3.6 percent year-over-year – and gross profit of around $2.9 billion. The company made $1 billion of gross profit in December 2025 alone. Full-year revenue came in at about $24.2 billion, and gross profit was around $10.36 billion.

“2025 was a strong year for us,” Dorsey wrote in the shareholder letter, before posing the question, “Why are we changing how we operate going forward?”

His answer, spread across the letter and a Xeet, is that AI has already changed the way Block works, so it needs to change its structure.

“We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly,” he wrote on X.

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare.

Well, here we go again.

A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).

What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict:

Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet.

Taalas HC1: 17,000 tokens/sec on Llama 3.1 8B vs Nvidia H200's 233 tokens/sec. 73x faster at one-tenth the power. Each chip runs ONE model, hardwired into the transistors.

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.

Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage.

Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.

The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal.

"Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs – those below about $500," he told The Register.

https://archive.is/UuldS

Imagine this: You're on Reddit, Hacker News, or some forum, posting with a silly username like GamerCat2025 or SecretCoderX. You think you are anonymous, and no one knows you and so you can freely express your thoughts.

Well, a brand-new research paper just blew that idea apart. It's called "Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs" which is a fancy way of saying "figuring out the real person behind a secret online name".

The researchers include people ETH Zurich and, Anthropic (parent company of Claude), and a research group called MATS and they proved that today's super-powerful AI chatbots can play detective and unmask people way better than ever before.