An anonymous reader shares a report: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is "close" to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a "supply chain risk" -- meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios.

The senior official said: "It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this."

That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told Axios: "The Department of War's relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed. Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people."

Anthropic's Claude is the only AI model currently available in the military's classified systems, and is the world leader for many business applications. Pentagon officials heartily praise Claude's capabilities.

Rivian's stock skyrocketed 27% Friday after the electric car maker "shocked the market with strong earnings results," reports the Los Angeles Times, "proving itself an outlier in the EV market, which has been struggling with the end of government subsidies and cooling consumer excitement."

They add that Rivian's strong earnings results suggest that "after years of struggling with losses, it may have at last found a path to profitability." On Thursday, Rivian reported gross profits for 2025 of $144 million, compared with a net loss in 2024 of $1.2 billion... Rivian credited the swing to gross profit to "strong software and services performance, higher average selling prices, and reductions in cost per vehicle..." Rivian delivered 42,247 vehicles in 2025 and produced 42,284 vehicles. The company still reported a $432-million net loss for the year for automotive profits, an improvement from 2024.
But Rivian's software and services revenue grew more than threefold to $1.55 billion for the year, reports TechCrunch. "And the joint venture with Volkswagen Group was behind most of that growth, according to Rivian." VW and Rivian formed a technology joint venture in 2024 that is worth up to $5.8 billion. The joint venture is milestone-based and in 2025 Rivian hit the mark, which meant a $1 billion payout in the form of a share sale. Under the terms of the JV, Rivian will supply VW Group with its existing electrical architecture and software technology stack... Rivian is expected to receive an additional $2 billion of capital as part of the joint venture in 2026, CFO Claire McDonough said Thursday on the company earnings call... And while the funds provide a hefty stopgap, Rivian's financial success in 2026 will hinge largely on the rollout of its next EV, the R2 [priced around $45,000].

Bloomberg reports: India tightened rules governing social media content and platforms, particularly targeting artificially generated and manipulated material, in a bid to crack down on the rapid spread of misinformation and deepfakes. The government on Tuesday (Feb 10) notified new rules under an existing law requiring social media firms to comply with takedown requests from Indian authorities within three hours and prominently label AI-generated content. The rules also require platforms to put in place measures to prevent users from posting unlawful material...

Companies will need to invest in 24-hour monitoring centres as enforcement shifts toward platforms rather than users, said Nikhil Pahwa, founder of MediaNama, a publication tracking India's digital policy... The onus of identification, removal and enforcement falls on tech firms, which could lose immunity from legal action if they fail to act within the prescribed timeline.
The new rules also require automated tools to detect and prevent illegal AI content, the BBC reports. And they add that India's new three-hour deadline is "a sharp tightening of the existing 36-hour deadline." [C]ritics worry the move is part of a broader tightening of oversight of online content and could lead to censorship in the world's largest democracy with more than a billion internet users... According to transparency reports, more than 28,000 URLs or web links were blocked in 2024 following government requests...

Delhi-based technology analyst Prasanto K Roy described the new regime as "perhaps the most extreme takedown regime in any democracy". He said compliance would be "nearly impossible" without extensive automation and minimal human oversight, adding that the tight timeframe left little room for platforms to assess whether a request was legally appropriate. On AI labelling, Roy said the intention was positive but cautioned that reliable and tamper-proof labelling technologies were still developing.
DW reports that India has also "joined the growing list of countries considering a social media ban for children under 16."

"Young Indians are not happy and are already plotting workarounds."

"More than two years after the last major 9.1 release, the Vim project has announced Vim 9.2," reports the blog Linuxiac: A big part of this update focuses on improving Vim9 Script as Vim 9.2 adds support for enums, generic functions, and tuple types.

On top of that, you can now use built-in functions as methods, and class handling includes features like protected constructors with _new(). The :defcompile command has also been improved to fully compile methods, which boosts performance and consistency in Vim9 scripts.

Insert mode completion now includes fuzzy matching, so you get more flexible suggestions without extra plugins. You can also complete words from registers using CTRL-X CTRL-R. New completeopt flags like nosort and nearest give you more control over how matches are shown. Vim 9.2 also makes diff mode better by improving how differences are lined up and shown, especially in complex cases.
Plus on Linux and Unix-like systems, Vim "now adheres to the XDG Base Directory Specification, using $HOME/.config/vim for user configuration," according to the release notes.

And Phoronix Mcites more new features: Vim 9.2 features "full support" for Wayland with its UI and clipboard handling. The Wayland support is considered experimental in this release but it should be in good shape overall...

Vim 9.2 also brings a new vertical tab panel alternative to the horizontal tab line.

The Microsoft Windows GUI for Vim now also has native dark mode support.
You can find the new release on Vim's "Download" page.

Starting in 2009, the U.S. government have given car manufacturers towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions if they included "start-stop" systems in cars with internal combustion engines. (These systems automatically shut off idling engines to reduce pollution and fuel consumption.) But this week the new head of America's Environmental Protection Agency eliminated the credits, reports Car and Driver: [America's] Environmental Protection Agency previously supported the system's effectiveness, noting that it could improve fuel economy by as much as 5 percent. That said, the use of these systems has never actually been mandated for automakers here in the States. Companies have instead opted to install the systems on all of their vehicles to receive off-cycle credits from the feds. Virtually every new vehicle on sale in the country today also allows drivers to turn the feature off via a hard button as well. Still, that apparently isn't keeping the EPA from making a move against the system.
"I absolutely hate Start-Stop systems," writes long-time Slashdot reader sinij (who says they "specifically shopped for a car without one.") Any other Slashdot readers want to share their opinions?

Post your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Start-Stop systems — fuel-saving innovation, or a modern-day auto annoyance"

Meta, TikTok, Snap and other social neteworks agreed this week to be rated on their teen safety efforts, reports the Los Angeles Times, "amid rising concern about whether the world's largest social media platforms are doing enough to protect the mental health of young people." The Mental Health Coalition, a collective of organizations focused on destigmatizing mental health issues, said Tuesday that it is launching standards and a new rating system for online platforms. For the Safe Online Standards (S.O.S.) program, an independent panel of global experts will evaluate companies on parameters including safety rules, design, moderation and mental health resources. TikTok, Snap and Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — will be the first companies to be graded. Discord, YouTube, Pinterest, Roblox and Twitch have also agreed to participate, the coalition said in a news release.

"These standards provide the public with a meaningful way to evaluate platform protections and hold companies accountable — and we look forward to more tech companies signing up for the assessments," Antigone Davis, vice president and global head of safety at Meta, said in a statement... The ratings will be color-coded, and companies that perform well on the tests will get a blue shield badge that signals they help reduce harmful content on the platform and their rules are clear. Those that fall short will receive a red rating, indicating they're not reliably blocking harmful content or lack proper rules. Ratings in other colors indicate whether the platforms have partial protection or whether their evaluations haven't been completed yet.

Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way. From a report: The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world's most popular apps. Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing its recommender systems. The demand follows the Commission's declaration that TikTok's design is addictive to users -- especially children.

The fact that the Commission said TikTok should change the basic design of its service is "ground-breaking for the business model fueled by surveillance and advertising," said Katarzyna Szymielewicz, president of the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish civil society group. That doesn't bode well for other platforms, particularly Meta's Facebook and Instagram. The two social media giants are also under investigation over the addictiveness of their design.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: Telcos likely received advance warning about January's critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise. Global Telnet traffic "fell off a cliff" on January 14, six days before security advisories for CVE-2026-24061 went public on January 20. The flaw, a decade-old bug in GNU InetUtils telnetd with a 9.8 CVSS score, allows trivial root access exploitation. GreyNoise data shows Telnet sessions dropped 65 percent within one hour on January 14, then 83 percent within two hours. Daily sessions fell from an average 914,000 (December 1 to January 14) to around 373,000, equating to a 59 percent decrease that persists today.

"That kind of step function — propagating within a single hour window — reads as a configuration change on routing infrastructure, not behavioral drift in scanning populations," said GreyNoise's Bob Rudis and "Orbie," in a recent blog [post]. The researchers unverified theory is that infrastructure operators may have received information about the make-me-root flaw before advisories went to the masses...

18 operators, including BT, Cox Communications, and Vultr went from hundreds of thousands of Telnet sessions to zero by January 15... All of this points to one or more Tier 1 transit providers in North America implementing port 23 filtering. US residential ISP Telnet traffic dropped within the US maintenance window hours, and the same occurred at those relying on transatlantic or transpacific backbone routes, all while European peering was relatively unaffected, they added.

Telecom operators planning aggressive fiber and fixed wireless broadband rollouts in 2026 face a serious supply problem -- DRAM and NAND memory prices for consumer applications have surged more than 600% over the past year as higher-margin AI server segments absorb available capacity, according to Counterpoint Research.

Routers, gateways and set-top boxes have been hit hardest, far worse than smartphones; prices for "consumer memory" used in broadband equipment jumped nearly 7x over the last nine months, compared to 3x for mobile memory. Memory now makes up more than 20% of the bill of materials in low-to-mid-end routers, up from around 3% a year ago. Counterpoint expects prices to keep rising through at least June 2026. Telcos that were also looking to push AI-enabled customer premises equipment -- requiring even more compute and memory content -- face additional headwinds.

The Detroit Big Three -- General Motors, Ford and Stellantis -- have collectively announced more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle businesses after years of aggressive investment into a transition that, even before Republican lawmakers abolished a $7,500 federal tax credit last fall, was already running below expectations.

U.S. EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 once the credit expired in September, and Congress also eliminated federal fuel-efficiency mandates. More than $20 billion in previously announced investments in EV and battery facilities were canceled last year -- the first net annual decrease in years, according to Atlas Public Policy.

GM has laid off thousands of workers and is converting plants once earmarked for EV trucks and motors to produce gas-powered trucks and V-8 engines. Ford dissolved a joint venture with a South Korean conglomerate to make batteries and now plans to build just one low-cost electric pickup by 2027. Stellantis is unloading its stake in a battery-making business after booking the largest EV-related charge of any automaker so far. Outside the U.S., the trajectory looks different: China's BYD recently overtook Tesla as the world's largest EV seller.

Meta was granted a patent in late December that describes how a large language model could be trained on a deceased user's historical activity -- their comments, likes, and posted content -- to keep their social media accounts active after they're gone.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, is listed as the primary author of the patent, first filed in 2023. The AI clone could like and comment on posts, respond to DMs, and even simulate video or audio calls on the user's behalf. A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider the company has "no plans to move forward" with the technology.

Europe risks undermining its own competitiveness drive by restricting access to foreign technology, Google's president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker told the Financial Times, as Brussels accelerates efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants. Walker said the EU faces a "competitive paradox" as it seeks to spur growth while restricting the technologies needed to achieve that goal.

He warned against erecting walls that make it harder to use some of the best technology in the world, especially as it advances quickly. EU leaders gathered Thursday for a summit in Belgium focused on increasing European competitiveness in a more volatile global economy. Europe's digital sovereignty push gained momentum in recent months, driven by fears that President Donald Trump's foreign policy could force a tech decoupling.

Waymo's autonomous vehicles can transport passengers across six cities without a human driver, but the Alphabet-owned company has discovered that its cars become completely inert if a passenger accidentally leaves a door open. The company confirmed that it is now paying DoorDash drivers in Atlanta to close these doors as part of a pilot program.

A Reddit post from a DoorDash driver showed an offer of $6.25 to drive less than one mile to a Waymo vehicle and close its door, plus an additional $5 after verified completion. Waymo and DoorDash told TechCrunch the post is legitimate. The door-closing partnership began earlier this year and is separate from the autonomous delivery service the two companies launched in Phoenix in October. Waymo has also worked with Honk, a towing service app, in Los Angeles on the same problem. Honk users in L.A. have been offered up to $24 to close a Waymo door. Future Waymo vehicles will have automated door closures.

Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, New York Times reported Friday, five years after the social giant shut down facial recognition on Facebook and promised to find "the right balance" for the controversial technology.

The feature, internally called "Name Tag," would let wearers identify people and retrieve information about them through Meta's AI assistant, the report added. An internal memo from May acknowledged the feature carries "safety and privacy risks" and noted that political tumult in the United States would distract civil society groups that might otherwise criticize the launch. The company is exploring restrictions that would prevent the glasses from functioning as a universal facial recognition tool, potentially limiting identification to people connected on Meta platforms or those with public accounts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. messenger app WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms, has been completely blocked in Russia for failing to comply with local law, the Kremlin said on Thursday, suggesting Russians turn to a state-backed "national messenger" instead. "Due to Meta's unwillingness to comply with Russian law, such a decision was indeed taken and implemented," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, proposing that Russians switch to MAX, Russia's state-owned messenger.

Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11's Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday update, stemmed from Notepad's relatively new Markdown support -- a feature Microsoft added after discontinuing WordPad and rewriting Notepad to serve as both a plain text and rich text editor. An attacker only needed to create a Markdown file containing file:// links pointing to executables or special URIs like ms-appinstaller://, and a Ctrl+click in Markdown mode would launch them. Microsoft's fix now displays a warning dialog for any link that doesn't use http:// or https://, though the company did not explain why it chose a prompt over blocking non-standard links entirely. Notepad updates automatically through the Microsoft Store.

Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised 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 treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make.

Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off 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 Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or 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 intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its report, EY 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."

Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems -- solar panels, batteries 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 price, financing and fuel or charging costs, but excluded policy-related factors like taxes and subsidies. Electric two-wheelers could reach cost parity even sooner, by the end of the decade, thanks to smaller battery packs.

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

T-Mobile is opening registration today for a beta test of Live Translation, an AI-powered feature that will translate live phone calls into more than 50 languages when it launches this spring.

The feature operates at the network level, so it doesn't require any specific app or device -- beta participants simply dial 87 to activate it on a call. T-Mobile President of Technology and CTO John Saw told The Verge that Live Translation works over VoLTE, VoNR and VoWiFi, meaning it isn't limited to 5G. The only requirement is that a T-Mobile customer must initiate the translation. The beta will be free, though T-Mobile has not said whether the feature will eventually be paywalled.

Google on Tuesday expanded its "Results about you" tool to let users request the removal of Search results containing government-issued ID numbers -- including driver's licenses, passports and Social Security numbers -- adding to the tool's existing ability to flag results that surface phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses.

The update, announced on Safer Internet Day, is rolling out in the U.S. over the coming days. Google also streamlined its process for reporting non-consensual explicit images on Search, allowing users to select and submit removal requests for multiple images at once rather than reporting them individually.