SoylentNews

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/10/27/ibm-admits-mainframes-need-to-be-modernized-and-will-use-ai-to-do-the-job/5305618

IBM touts its Z series mainframes as the most reliable and cost-effective environments for certain workloads, but on Monday also acknowledged that the platform can drift towards hard-to-manage complexity that reduces resilience and therefore needs some help from AI.

Big Blue admitted that not all mainframe estates exist in a state of perfect bliss in a Statement of Direction for a forthcoming product called "IBM Z Atlas" that the document describes as "an AI-native solution that uses system intelligence to ground AI skills and agents in the context of key workflows like planning and validating changes or modernizing applications and infrastructure."

"It intends to map a client's entire z/OS stack across infrastructure, middleware, and applications, and then use that system intelligence to reduce the manual effort of tasks like patch management, regulatory response, and sharing knowledge across every team, from systems programmers to application developers."

Big Blue also hopes the tool helps mainframe techs and ops teams "better understand how components connect, interact, and depend on one another."

"IBM Z Atlas intends to eliminate the leading cause of unplanned z/OS outages – changes that aren't proven to be safe – by mapping how a change impacts the z/OS stack, testing it, and validating it," the Statement of Direction adds. "This design accelerates clients' modernization efforts by keeping experts in control and giving every practitioner, in operations or development, the same shared Z system visibility to reduce risk."

IBM reckons Z Atlas will help mainframe shops do four things:

• Understand systems and dependencies before making decisions or initiating changes

• Assess potential impacts, risks, and operational considerations

• Accelerate planning for modernization, deployment, and provisioning

• Provide trusted context for AI-native experiences and automation

While IBM clearly sees AI has a role in helping its customers to manage mainframes, it appears not to be going all-in on AIOps – the emerging practice of allowing agents to either keep tech infrastructure humming, or autonomously find issues and develop proposed fixes.

"IBM intends for AI-assisted insights and recommendations to preserve appropriate human review and decision authority," the Statement of Direction reads.

The multiple mentions of modernization caught your correspondent's eye, because IBM's many rivals often suggest the best way to modernize mainframes is by trashing them and moving the applications they run to another platform. In recent years, vendors have suggested using generative AI to rewrite mainframe apps in other languages, an idea that analyst firm Gartner thinks is highly overrated.

IBM clearly wants modernization to mean making mainframes easier to live with so that customers persist with the platform, a critical outcome as the company's revenue spikes when each new generation of Z-series machines hits the market. Indeed, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna last week said the current Z17 generation of mainframes has outsold all others by $1 billion.

That kind of result well and truly puts to bed the "death of the mainframe" narrative that, like next year becoming the Year of Linux on the Desktop, is a prediction that never goes away and never comes to fruition. With Z Atlas, IBM seems to be trying to ensure rumors of the mainframe's demise are even more exaggeratedly false.

Original Submission

Ingar writes:

On October 22, an attacker gained unauthorized access to Luanti's ContentDB's servers, including emails, hashed passwords, and uploads. ContentDB is the official source to download content such as mods, games and texture packs (collectively referred to as "packages") that have been developed by the Luanti community, for the game formerly known as Minetest.

Users are asked to take the necessary actions.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Payload blobs measuring 12.9 to 13.7 MB were large enough to evade GitHub code search:

A new Miasma-family npm worm, originally believed to be just a test with no victims, secretly armed 42 real GitHub repositories from 11 owners, hijacking accounts as early as July and using a stealthy payload built to stay hidden from GitHub and automated scanners, according to JFrog researchers.

Threat hunters at SafeDep, an open source supply chain security firm, first spotted the "testmetest" npm campaign last week, identifying 18 packages linked to the same operator between October 19 and October 25, including releases containing credential-stealing malware. As with earlier npm worms, the malware is self-replicating, steals credentials, and installs a wiper that deletes the home directory when the victim revokes the stolen GitHub token, the security researchers noted. 

The new npm worm shares code with June's Miasma Phantom Gyp worm, and adds Mini Shai-Hulud's token-revocation wiper. 

As of October 22, however, SafeDep had found no compromised third-party packages or victims. "All observed activity belongs to the operator's own test accounts," the team wrote. 

As with most happy-ending security stories, that proved too good to be true.

In a Monday report, supply chain security company JFrog said its analysis proved otherwise, and found the testmetest campaign operator "had already armed real repositories belonging to established developers and organizations." 

This isn't just about timing, either, according to JFrog researchers Guy Korolevski and Yair Benamou. "The payload blobs were large enough to evade the GitHub search and API paths normally used to find this kind of compromise," they wrote.

looorg writes:

Harddrives and storage are getting so expensive in the age of AI that companies are looking for old, reliable and working solutions. Solution --> Magnetic tapes. They never really went away but are now in for a resurgence.

Fujifilm's magnetic tape investment targets fivefold output by 2028

Advanced tapes will offer capacities reaching 100 TB.
Tape storage can cost one-quarter as much as HDD storage.

Will we see the return of other old tech to cover the gaps? Eco friendly giant punch-cards?

https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/10/28/fujifilm-magnetic-tape-investment/
https://vgtimes.com/tech-and-hardware/172697-fujifilm-plans-fivefold-magnetic-tape-output-increase-as-ai-demand-grows.html
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/artificial-intelligence/as-ai-revives-magnetic-tape-fujifilm-plans-biggest-buildup-in-two-decades

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Two US senators say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding the FISA court decision while it presses Congress to renew America's most sweeping surveillance program.

Congress is being asked to renew one of the most expansive surveillance authorities in US law. The administration, reportedly, just won't say what the court overseeing it actually found.

That is the situation senators Ron Wyden and Adam Schiff described publicly on October 26, alleging the Trump administration missed a legally required deadline to release a significant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion concerning how intelligence agencies handle Americans' communications intercepted under Section 702.

The deadline passed September 13. No opinion appeared. No waiver. No public explanation.

[Source]: GADGET REVIEW

[Also Covered By]: WIRED

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/emulate-apple-ii-on-raspberry-pi/

The Apple II was not the first personal or home computer, but it was part of the iconic 'trinity' of computers that came out in 1977: Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80.
[...]
In designing the Apple II, Steve Wozniak took inspiration from his work on the Breakout arcade game during his time at Atari. It's why the Apple II has colour graphics, support for paddle controllers, and even audio.
[...]
The Apple II included a version of the BASIC language that only supported integer numeric data types: by eschewing floating-point numbers, Wozniak's Integer BASIC, as it was called, processed numbers extremely fast. This made it less than ideal for certain programming tasks, but it was fantastic for video games.
[...]
For Apple II emulation on Raspberry Pi, we are using the LinApple emulator. It's a fork of the AppleWin emulator which was originally created by Mike O'Brien. David Baucum (maxolasersquad) and several other contributors got it running on Linux. You may also want to have a look at audetto's fork of the AppleWin emulator. Because audetto's fork is regularly synchronised with the original AppleWin GitHub repository, it tracks AppleWin features more closely.
[...]
Here's a little BASIC program you can try running. You can either type it into the emulator, or you can find the program in the ch03/AppleIIBasicPrograms.dsk file in the GitHub repository.
[...]
This will draw a small square on screen. Use the W, A, S, and D keys to move it around the screen. The program is quite simple.
[...]
After you run a graphical program, you'll only have a small text area below the graphics mode portion of the emulator screen. You can type the TEXT command and press ENTER to return to text-only mode. You'll also find these commands helpful:

        LIST — lists all the lines of the current BASIC program.
        RUN — runs the current program.
        NEW — erases the current program and lets you start afresh.
        CATALOG — lists all files on the disk image.
        SAVE NAME — saves the current BASIC program under whatever file name you specify.
        LOAD NAME — loads the program with the specified file name.
        CTRL+C — use this key combination to stop a running BASIC program.

Apart from CATALOG, these commands only apply to BASIC programs. Many games are binary executable files that don't include BASIC source.

You can find some fun type-in programs in Lee Fastenau's collection of short programs.
[...]
This tutorial is part of a series of emulation guides in The Raspberry Pi Guide to Retro Gaming — a definitive guide on how to play your favourite games of yesteryear on a Raspberry Pi. You can also find it in the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The findings suggest possible surveillance interest in countries where Starlink is banned or restricted.

Discover-Tech, an Israeli advertising firm previously linked to the delivery of zero-click spyware, is the top bidder for Starlink ad impressions in 105 countries, according to a new report from Reuters. Researchers say it all points to a large-scale tracking effort aimed at users of SpaceX's satellite internet service.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, posted on X that data from TrendAI suggest the existence of a "worldwide surveillance op targeting @Starlink users."

Discover-Tech was previously named in Citizen Lab's October 15th report as the buyer of ordinary-looking ads that delivered Candiru spyware to devices at Al Jazeera without any user interaction. Candiru is an Israeli mercenary spyware vendor (now rebranded as Integrity Labs) that develops tools capable of silently compromising phones and computers. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security added Candiru to their trade restriction list, known as the Entity List, over concerns it supplied surveillance technology used against journalists, activists, and government officials.

[Source]: GIZMODO

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2295033/warhound-genetically-engineering-dogs-military/

Warhound, a new startup that has just raised $200 million in funding, aims to genetically engineer war dogs for the US military and fit them with high-tech gear. It's a project by Colossal Biosciences' Ben Lamm and Anduril's Palmer Luckey. Lamm has told Wired that Warhound has already started editing genes of the cell samples taken from its first batch of donor dogs. Specifically, the startup collected samples from top-performing military, police and first responder dog breeds in the US, mostly Belgian Malinois, some labradors and some shepherds. The goal is to clone them after scientists working for Colossal have tweaked their genes.

Those scientists will initially focus on making them less likely to develop health conditions that commonly affect their breeds, such as hip dysplasia and certain cancers. In the future, Lamm thinks the dogs could be enhanced further. Scientist could incorporate more genetic changes to make them faster and more agile or to enhance their sense of smell, Lamm told TechCrunch.

Luckey, if you'll recall, founded Oculus VR and designed the Oculus Rift headset. His company Anduril teamed up with OpenAI in 2024 to develop AI for the Pentagon. More recently, it secured a contract with the US Army to create its next-gen battlefield intelligence system alongside Palantir. Meanwhile, Lamm's biotech company is behind several "de-extinction" initiatives, including one that claims to have revived the dire wolf and another that aims to bring back the woolly mammoth.

So where does Luckey's Anduril come in? Warhound doesn't seem to have plans to create cyborg dogs — for now. Anduril will be designing tools and the software powering them, which will help protect the dogs while they work. Think goggles, vests and body armor. Luckey is a partner in the business, but neither he nor Anduril has a stake in the startup. Colossal Biosciences has equity in the company, and Lamm is on its board. David Spirk, who most recently worked at Palantir, now serves the startsup's CEO.

Warhound expects its first batch of genetically engineered dogs to be born in early 2027. They will be trained to perform various tasks working dogs do, such as detect bombs and aid in search-and-rescue operations.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/from-cheap-tool-to-premium-subscription-when-a-beloved-apps-price-skyrockets/

How much are you willing to pay to keep using your favorite app?

Maybe you've used it for years. Perhaps it performs a function so essential and specific that you couldn't imagine what you'd do without it.
[...]
Earlier this year, Evernote, a note-taking app, changed its subscription tiers, forcing some users to go from paying $130 per year to $250.
[...]
10 times more than what Evernote charged for annual subscriptions from its 2008 launch until 2016.
[...]
When Bending Spoons bought Evernote in 2023, the app had a sizable customer base. In a June SEC filing, Bending Spoons explained that it was attracted to Evernote's 200 million accounts and high user engagement.
[...]
Although price hikes risk eroding customer loyalty, Bending Spoons investigated how much change in pricing and subscription tiers Evernote users would tolerate.
[...]
Shortly after the acquisition, Evernote prices increased (from $8 per month to $15/month, or from $70/year to $130/year). The new prices aimed to better align "with how different customer segments... engage with" Evernote, and, in combination with product improvements, led to "average revenue per monthly active user being 2.5 times as high in 2025 as in 2022," Bending Spoons said.
[...]
Evernote released over 150 product updates in 2025, the filing says. Evernote v11, a huge update, came out in 2026.

While issuing layoffs in July 2023, Bending Spoons said Evernote had been "unprofitable for years." By November 2024, the app had reportedly reached record levels of profitability.
[...]
Comments from Inkdrop's developer also help explain steep price hikes imposed on longtime app users.

In 2024, the Markdown note-taking app's price doubled from $5/month to $10/month or $50/year to $100/year. At the time, Inkdrop's creator, Takuya Matsuyama, wrote a blog post
[...]
Inkdrop's developer was less concerned about growing its customer base and more interested in extracting additional revenue from current users.
[...]
Mature apps with longtime subscribers, initially drawn in through low prices and reliable features, face a predicament. Those loyal users are good for business, but they're often content with software that functions as it always has—and don't expect to pay more for it.

But stagnant growth doesn't mix well with inflation or stockholder expectations.
[...]
prices apps launch with aren't sustainable in the long term, as Plex has said about its lifetime pass, which has seen its price increase by 525 percent over two price hikes since March 2024. We've seen a similar pattern with streaming apps.
[...]
when price hikes are unavoidable, giving customers advance warning can go a long way toward showing loyal users they're valued.

Another option is to offer more subscription tiers in general. Developers often cite new features to justify higher subscription prices, but not all users want those features.
[...]
Sometimes, various internal and external factors make higher prices inevitable. When that happens, users would be wise to reexamine whether that beloved app is still the best option after all these years.

Related Stories:
DMCA Takedowns Remove Perfectly Legal Plex Pages from Google - 20210131
Critical Flaw in Evernote Add-On Exposed Sensitive Data of Millions - 20190622
Plex is Shutting Down its Personal Cloud Streaming Service - 20180912
Forget Fast-Forwarding, Plex DVR Can Now Remove Commercials for You - 20171130
Evernote, the Wounded Silicon Valley Unicorn - 20151006
Samsung Allegedly Inserts Ads into Locally-Stored/Played Movies - 20150212

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2295216/most-popular-streaming-platforms-united-states-not-what-you-think/

These numbers come from Nielsen's The Gauge, which tracks viewing time on TV, not subscriber numbers, app downloads or viewing on a phone. In July 2026, 49 percent of all TV time was spent on streaming. Live channels watched via YouTube TV count toward broadcast or cable viewing, so the standalone pay TV service doesn't inflate YouTube's streaming share. It's interesting that the platform most focused on individual creators beat core streaming services so handily, especially when this is TV-only and thus doesn't include people looking up tutorials on their phones.

Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery each have several services grouped together, while The Roku Channel and Tubi are counted individually. These numbers are for July, before Paramount (now Skydance) acquired Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6.

Despite its lower position, Peacock had a good month, with TV viewing up 15 percent from June. World Cup coverage gave it a boost, and Love Island USA had 4.9 billion viewing minutes in July. Nielsen said it was still evaluating the impact of a June change to how it measures Tubi.

YouTube reported more than 700 million hours of podcasts watched on living-room devices in October 2025, up from 400 million a year earlier. Its regular videos are free with ads, but it has no shortage of ways to take your money. You can rent or buy movies, subscribe to YouTube Premium or pay for individual creator memberships. Netflix primarily relies on recurring plans, while Prime Video offers rentals and add-on channel subscriptions.

Fox already owns Tubi and agreed to acquire Roku in a deal valued at approximately $22 billion in June. Roku confirmed on October 19 that the transaction was still pending.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Finland is angry at Google over illegal deforestation. Chopping down about 400 000 trees to make room for two data centers. The construction has been halted.

In addition to the 250,000 trees felled at Muhos, Annala estimates that an additional 150,000 trees were felled at Otanmäki. Because the trees have been felled illegally, she says wood from the two sites cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.

She said the system depended a lot on trust, which she believes Google took advantage of. "They bought the vast land area and they just started to cut it, just like that," she said. "It's pure arrogance and it's amazing."

Google apologized and said it acted based on its understanding of Finnish law at the time.

Google said it was working to protect water quality at the Muhos site, and that it planned to plant trees across 130 hectares there. Conservationists say that figure is too low to have any real impact in comparison to the damage done by the tree felling.

We so sorry. Promise it won't happen again, until next time. I know Finnish is hard. But don't Google offer a tool to translate it to something they can read and understand?

Jussi Kangasharju, head of computer science at the University of Helsinki, said that while datacentres brought a limited number of jobs, potentially boosting the local economy, the benefits on a national level were minimal. "Really, for Finland, there are no benefits," he said. "They are international companies serving international customers. Very little corporate taxes go to Finland. Datacentres ultimately have very little benefit for others except the datacentre operator."

No benefit.

I guess the next US export is finally here. Hating Data center buildings. All them trees gone is not going to help when the electricity bill comes ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/oct/22/finland-google-felling-trees-datacentre
https://cybernews.com/news/google-finland-data-center-trees/

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/what-in-house-legal-leaders-really-think-about-ai-in-their-own-words

Multiple surveys count how many lawyers are using AI. A new report set out to ask what happens to their workload when they do.

AI isn’t replacing in-house lawyers, but the capacity it frees up is being absorbed by new work, much of it drafted by AI itself.

That is just one of the pictures to emerge from interviews with legal and compliance leaders at companies that included eir, Flipdish, Gilead Sciences, IMRO, Mastercard, Uniphar and Wayflyer for a new report, ‘From AI Adoption to AI Advantage’, produced by Dentons Ireland and SiliconRepublic.com.

Rather than creating another survey full of statistics, we set out to ask what responsible and effective use actually looks like inside a legal function today, and the results often belied the received wisdom.

Almost nobody we interviewed reported AI replacing a role or a function outright. Where it is paying off, it is mostly in repetitive work such as invoice review, contract checking and customer screening, rather than in the research, drafting and judgement calls at the heart of the job.

Sergey Kinchin, senior counsel at Uniphar, said his own thinking had changed completely in a year. “Last year I would have thought it would probably reduce headcount. Now I’m seeing it more as unlocking unmet demand,” he said. “I think the complexity of the work that’s left after AI will increase. The bottom might shift up, but the overall pyramid of work will increase and grow.”

It was a sentiment echoed by many of our interviewees. Máire Neary, who was VP of people and legal at Flipdish when she was interviewed, described treating AI “as a junior colleague, something that’s additive, that can challenge me, but you have to remember you’re the lawyer in charge at the end of the day”.

The catch is that the same tools are now in everyone else’s hands. Producing a long, polished complaint, subject access request or grievance is close to cost-free today, and the report says AI-assisted drafting now seems to touch the majority of incoming disputes, subject access requests, grievances and customer complaints.

Sorcha Nic Mhurchú, general counsel at eir, said the cost lies less in reading that material than in sorting through it. “You end up going back and having to figure out, line by line, what is relevant”, she said. “So that adds a lot of volume and time to any response, and that’s a reality for everybody, not just us.”

At IMRO, chief commercial officer Seán Donegan is glad he saw it coming. “Two years ago, I sat down with our licensing team and I said, guys, I’m going to make a prediction now,” he said. “The volume and tenacity of queries and complaints is going to increase exponentially with these AI tools.”

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/10/20/auto-tech-startup-claims-it-traced-hack-attempt-back-to-rivals-ip-address/5304281

An automotive tech startup claims that its IT systems were attacked by individuals trying to steal its driving model, and that those attacks came from an IP address associated with a rival in the space.

The tech startup, IQ.Lvbs, described the alleged security incident in a recent blog post.

On October 3, IQ.Lvbs introduced the private beta of NovaSpark, the first model for the company's IQ.Pilot app, in the Comma.ai Discord channel. They put it in that channel because the model requires the use of Comma.ai's camera hardware, which is built for self-driving vehicles.

From there, things got weird.

"From October 7 to 14, we faced repeated attempts to steal NovaSpark, access users' devices and private driving files, and exploit our sign-in system," the IQ.Lvbs blog post claims. "The first requests came from an IP assigned to Comma.ai Inc."

In addition, on October 8 – shortly after the alleged attacks began – somebody banned IQ.Lvbs' team from the Comma.ai Discord channel. Posts on the IQ.Pilot Discord channel indicate that individuals doing private beta testing for IQ.Lvbs have also been banned from that channel.

One of the three people involved in IQ.Lvbs, a UI/UX designer who asked to be identified only as "Cat," speculated to The Register about the reasons for the alleged hack and Discord ban.

"Our model, NovaSpark, is a good deal ahead of Comma's latest small and large models, which directly threatens their core business of making AI models good enough to sell their hardware," he said. "Comma for the most part has been stagnant in their models' improvement and that was a main driver for us making NovaSpark."

An October 7, 2026 Discord message from user Torq_boi, said to be Harald Schäfer, Comma.ai's CTO, implies NovaSpark was distilled from Comma.ai's Rebellious Hope model.

"I'm glad people are training models and experimenting with this stuff," the post starts. "But don't lie to people about what you're doing, and saying it's not a finetune of existing comma models when it is. That's not cool."

IQ.Lvbs disputes that assertion and says it did the work on its own. "The claim that NovaSpark is Rebellious Hope with a short fine-tune and an unchanged policy does not survive scrutiny, and we're not sure how Comma came to that conclusion, especially considering that they do not possess NovaSpark's model weights or ONNX," the biz said.

In the log data IQ.Lvbs published to support its claims, the company flags the username haraschax as one of those associated with Comma.ai IP addresses. Schäfer uses that username on GitHub.

Comma.ai and Schäfer did not respond to requests for comment sent to several different addresses. The Discord user Torq_boi in the Comma.ai channel did not respond to a DM seeking comment.

Comma.ai is currently being investigated [PDF] by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to assess whether its driving automation tech contributed to five crashes and three deaths.

IQ.Lvbs says it's considering legal action over the alleged hack. "We are currently reviewing our legal options and looking into involving the authorities," said Cat.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.

In the analysis published on Saturday, Apollo Global Management Inc. said that the "S&P 493," which refers to the S&P 500 minus technology firms Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Tesla Inc., has not yet benefited from its investments in AI.

... while the Magnificent Seven has seen real profits from AI, the profit margins and revenue per worker of other companies remains flat, with no evidence that the technology is enhancing productivity. "Mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins,"

"Mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it," he wrote. "As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited."

More analysis pointing in the direction of that the main beneficiaries from the AI-revolution are a handful of companies. The rest are desperately trying to find profit in their massive investments. When there is a gold rush sell shovels and pans still appears to be the valid business strategy? How long will the keep investing for that ever elusive future payoff day? To deep in the hole to stop digging?

https://siliconangle.com/2026/10/25/apollo-analysis-shows-that-no-one-apart-from-the-biggest-tech-giants-is-seeing-any-real-benefits-from-ai/
https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/no-signs-of-ai-payoff-outside-the-tech-sector

Original Submission

[Ed's Note: Title corrected-20261029:10:57Z]