In early 2025, Forbes reports, investigators at the FBI served Microsoft with a warrant seeking the BitLocker encryption recovery keys for several laptops it believed held evidence of fraud in Guam’s COVID-19 unemployment assistance program. And Microsoft complied with the FBI’s request. BitLocker is the name of the full-disk encryption technology that has been part of Windows for nearly two decades. Though initially only available to owners of the Pro…

Intel reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2025 yesterday, and the news both for the quarter and for the year was mixed: year-over-year revenue was down nearly imperceptibly, from $53.1 billion to $52.9 billion, while revenue for the quarter was down about four percent, from $14.3 billion last year to $13.7 billion this year. (That number was, nevertheless, on the high end of Intel’s guidance for the quarter,…

Telly, a company that accepts advertising data instead of cash for its TVs, has reportedly had a hard time getting its “free” TVs into people’s homes. Telly debuted in May 2023. Its dual-screen design can show ads, even when people aren’t watching. Although the smaller, secondary screen can be used for more helpful applications, like showing the weather or sports scores, its primary purpose is to serve as a billboard…

The project developer for one of the Internet’s most popular networking tools is scrapping its vulnerability reward program after being overrun by a spike in the submission of low-quality reports, much of it AI-generated slop. “We are just a small single open source project with a small number of active maintainers,” Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of the open source app cURL, said Thursday. “It is not in…

On Tuesday, eBay updated its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party “buy for me” agents and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform without permission, first spotted by Value Added Resource. On its face, a one-line terms of service update doesn’t seem like major news, but what it implies is more significant: The change reflects the rapid emergence of what some are calling “agentic commerce,” a new category of AI…

Websites that authenticate users through links and codes sent in text messages are imperiling the privacy of millions of people, leaving them vulnerable to scams, identity theft, and other crimes, recently published research has found. The links are sent to people seeking a range of services, including those offering insurance quotes, job listings, and referrals for pet sitters and tutors. To eliminate the hassle of collecting usernames and passwords—and for…

The companies that make RAM and flash memory chips are enjoying record profits because of the AI-induced memory crunch—and they’re also indicating that they don’t expect conditions to improve much if at all in 2026. And while RAM kits have been hit the fastest and hardest by shortages and price increases, we shouldn’t expect SSD pricing to improve any time soon, either. That’s the message from Shunsuke Nakato (via PC…

On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called “Humanizer,” the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. Chen published the plugin on GitHub, where it has picked up over 1,600 stars as of Monday….

YouTubers have been increasingly frustrated with Google’s management of the platform, with disinformation welcomed back and an aggressive push for more AI (except where Google doesn’t like it). So it’s no surprise that creators have been up in arms over the suspicious removal of YouTube’s advanced SRV3 caption format. You don’t have to worry too much just yet—Google says this is only temporary, and it’s working on a fix for…

TCL is taking majority ownership of Sony’s Bravia series of TVs, the two companies announced today. The two firms said they have signed a memorandum of understanding and aim to sign binding agreements by the end of March. Pending “relevant regulatory approvals and other conditions,” the joint venture is expected to launch in April 2027. Under a new joint venture, Huizhou, China-headquartered TCL will own 51 percent of Tokyo, Japan-headquartered…