C.I.A. Video Appeals to Potential Spies in China’s Military

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 18:11
The agency is seeking Chinese officials who are frustrated with corruption in the People’s Liberation Army.

The High-Stakes Fight Over Masked Federal Agents

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 17:45
The debate over whether federal agents should be allowed to cover their faces with masks has become a flashpoint as the government heads for a partial shutdown.

El Paso Incident Highlights Gaps in America’s Drone Defense Industry

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 17:33
The U.S. has spent billions of dollars developing counter-drone technology, but much of it needs more testing in the real world.

IBM Plans To Triple Entry-Level Hiring in the US

SlashDot - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 17:30
IBM said it will triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, even as AI appears to be weighing on broader demand for early-career workers. From a report: While the company declined to disclose specific hiring figures, it said the expansion will be "across the board," affecting a wide range of departments. "And yes, it's for all these jobs that we're being told AI can do," said Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's chief human resources officer, speaking at a conference this week in New York. LaMoreaux said she overhauled entry-level job descriptions for software developers and other roles to make the case internally for the recruitment push. "The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them," she said at Charter's Leading With AI Summit. "So, if you're going to convince your business leaders that you need to make this investment, then you need to be able to show the real value these individuals can bring now. And that has to be through totally different jobs."

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Do Drug Cartels Actually Use Drones at the Border?

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 17:01
U.S. officials warn that cartel-operated drones on the border pose a major threat. Mexican officials are less certain. Analysts say the answer is likely in between.

Intelligence Dispute Centers on Kushner Reference in Intercepted Communication

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 16:06
A whistle-blower has accused Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of blocking distribution of a report that Jared Kushner’s name came up in an intercepted communication about Iran.

Guard Troops Fully Withdraw From Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 16:00
President Trump initially deployed the troops in those cities to support law enforcement efforts to tamp down protests against immigration raids and protecting buildings.

WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties

SlashDot - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 16:00
WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark. The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, the parent company of Bluehost and HostGator, is already paying Automattic for trademark use, according to the complaint, and Automattic is in conversations with other hosts. The filing challenges the 8% royalty rate as arbitrary, citing Mullenweg's comments at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 where he said the figure was based on what WP Engine "could afford to pay." Internal Automattic correspondence cited in the complaint includes Mullenweg describing his approach to WP Engine as "nuclear war" and warning that if the hosting company didn't comply, he would start stealing its customers.

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A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 15:54
Human intelligence — the thing we as educators are duty bound to defend and advance — is under attack.

Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year

SlashDot - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 15:00
Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process after the round was several times subscribed. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, now has a $14 billion revenue run rate, about 80% of which comes from enterprise customers. It claims more than 500 customers spending over $1 million a year on its workplace tools. The round includes a portion of the $15 billion commitment from Microsoft and Nvidia announced late last year.

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Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing

SlashDot - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 14:10
An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources said that Palo Alto's findings that China was tied to the sprawling hacking spree were dialed back following last month's news, first reported by Reuters, that Palo Alto was one of about 15 U.S. and Israeli cybersecurity companies whose software had been banned by Chinese authorities on national security grounds. A draft version of the report by Palo Alto's Unit 42, the company's threat intelligence arm, said that the prolific hackers -- dubbed "TGR-STA-1030" in a report published on Thursday of last week -- were connected to Beijing, the two people said. The finished report instead described the hacking group more vaguely as a "state-aligned group that operates out of Asia." Attributing sophisticated hacks is notoriously difficult and debates over how best to assign blame for digital intrusions are common among cybersecurity researchers.

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What to Know About the E.P.A.’s Big Attack on Climate Regulation

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 13:45
The Trump administration has repealed the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

Microsoft Plans Smartphone-Style Permission Prompts for Windows 11 Apps

SlashDot - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 13:10
Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company's Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding user settings, installing unwanted software, and modifying core Windows experiences without permission. A separate initiative called Windows Baseline Security Mode will enforce runtime integrity safeguards by default, allowing only properly signed apps, services, and drivers to run. Both changes will roll out in phases as part of Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative, which the company launched in November 2023 after a federal review board called its security culture "inadequate."

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Strong Storm Is Forecast to Hit the South This Weekend With a Risk of Heavy Rain

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 12:31
It’s finally warming up, which means the storm will most likely bring rain instead of more dreaded ice. But forecasters warned that there may be a lot of it.

Alcohol’s Effects on the Body: What Does Drinking Do to Your Health?

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 12:28
From the moment you take a sip, drinking starts to influence your biology. Here’s an inside look.

Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser

SlashDot - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 12:12
An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation. The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House. Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that "the threat has been neutralized." But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.'s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said.

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On Trump’s Tariffs, Supreme Court Hurries Up and Waits

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 12:00
The justices put the case on a fast track at the administration’s urging. But they don’t seem in a rush to rule on the president’s signature economic program.

Americans Are Paying the Bill for Tariffs, Despite Trump’s Claims

NY Times - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 11:59
Research from the New York Fed confirms that U.S. companies and consumers are bearing tariff costs, despite the president’s assertions otherwise.

Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool

SlashDot - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 11:00
Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves. Kiro runs on Anthropic's Claude models but uses Amazon's own tooling, and the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use.

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The "Are You Sure?" Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind

SlashDot - jeu, 02/12/2026 - 10:03
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains. The behavior, known in the research community as sycophancy, stems from how these models are trained: reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, rewards responses that human evaluators prefer, and humans consistently rate agreeable answers higher than accurate ones. Anthropic published foundational research on this dynamic in 2023. The problem reached a visible breaking point in April 2025 when OpenAI had to roll back a GPT-4o update after users reported the model had become so excessively flattering it was unusable. Research on multi-turn conversations has found that extended interactions amplify sycophantic behavior further -- the longer a user talks to a model, the more it mirrors their perspective.

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