The rumor mill’s most reliable sources have been pointing to a refresh for Apple’s low-end $429 iPhone SE to land early this year, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the launch could be coming “as early as next week.” The new fourth-generation iPhone SE ought to be the device’s first significant makeover since 2020. It’s said to be adopting a design similar to the iPhone 14—one of the iPhones with…

A little over two weeks ago, a largely unknown China-based company named DeepSeek stunned the AI world with the release of an open source AI chatbot that had simulated reasoning capabilities that were largely on par with those from market leader OpenAI. Within days, the DeepSeek AI assistant app climbed to the top of the iPhone App Store’s “Free Apps” category, overtaking ChatGPT. On Thursday, mobile security company NowSecure reported…

For much of the past year, the trail of destruction and mayhem left behind by ransomware hackers was on full display. Digital extortion gangs paralyzed hundreds of US pharmacies and clinics through their attack on Change Healthcare, exploited security vulnerabilities in the customer accounts of cloud provider Snowflake to breach a string of high-profile targets, and extracted a record $75 million from a single victim. Yet beneath those headlines, the…

AMD announced its fourth-quarter earnings yesterday, and the numbers were mostly rosy: $7.7 billion in revenue and a 51 percent profit margin, compared to $6.2 billion and 47 percent a year ago. The biggest winner was the data center division, which made $3.9 billion thanks to Epyc server processors and Instinct AI accelerators, and Ryzen CPUs are also selling well, helping the company’s client segment earn $2.3 billion. But if…

Researchers said they recently discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the 7-Zip archiving utility that was actively exploited as part of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The vulnerability allowed a Russian cybercrime group to override a Windows protection designed to limit the execution of files downloaded from the Internet. The defense is commonly known as MotW, short for Mark of the Web. It works by placing a “Zone.Identifier” tag on all…

Let’s Encrypt has been providing free “wildcard” certificates for websites for nearly seven years, enabling HTTPS connections for millions of domains and doing the whole Internet a real solid. Now the nonprofit is ending a useful service, but in an exceedingly rare happenstance, it’s probably a good thing for everyone. Starting June 4, 2025, Let’s Encrypt will no longer notify its subscribers that their certification is about to expire and…

A mirror proxy Google runs on behalf of developers of the Go programming language pushed a backdoored package for more than three years until Monday, after researchers who spotted the malicious code petitioned for it to be taken down twice. The service, known as the Go Module Mirror, caches open source packages available on GitHub and elsewhere so that downloads are faster and to ensure they are compatible with the…

We’ve covered the Framework Laptop 13 primarily as a consumer Windows laptop, reviewing versions with multiple Intel and AMD processors. But the system’s modular nature makes it possible to expand it beyond Windows PC hardware, as we’ve seen with experiments like the (now-discontinued) Chromebook Edition of the laptop. Today Framework is expanding to something even more experimental: a DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard targeted primarily at developers. RISC-V is a fully open…

Federal prosecutors have indicted a man on charges he stole $65 million in cryptocurrency by exploiting vulnerabilities in two decentralized finance platforms and then laundering proceeds and attempting to extort swindled investors. The scheme, alleged in an indictment unsealed on Monday, occurred in 2021 and 2023 against the DeFI platforms KyberSwap and Indexed Finance. Both platforms provide automated services known as “liquidity pools” that allow users to move cryptocurrencies from…

In what is becoming a sadly regular occurrence, two popular free software projects, X.org/Freedesktop.org and Alpine Linux, need to rally some of their millions of users so that they can continue operating. Both services have largely depended on free server resources provided by Equinix (formerly Packet.net) and its Metal division for the past few years. Equinix announced recently that it was sunsetting its bare-metal sales and services, or renting out…