BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla is accusing Microsoft of stacking the deck against Firefox, arguing that design choices in Windows steer users toward Edge even when they explicitly choose another browser. According to Mozilla, parts of Windows still open links in Edge regardless of the default browser setting, including results from the taskbar search and links launched from apps like Outlook and Teams. Mozilla says this means Firefox often never even gets the opportunity to handle those links, which quietly shifts user activity back into Microsoft's ecosystem.

The company also points to Microsoft's aggressive rollout of Copilot as another example of platform power being used to push Microsoft services. Copilot appeared pinned to the taskbar, arrived automatically on many systems with Microsoft 365, and even received a dedicated keyboard key on some laptops. Mozilla argues that when the maker of the dominant desktop operating system promotes its own browser and AI tools at the system level, it becomes far harder for independent browsers like Firefox to compete.

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company may eventually sell its Trainium AI chips directly to outside customers, not just through AWS, which would put Amazon in more direct competition with Nvidia. "There's so much demand for our chips that it's quite possible we'll sell racks of them to third parties in the future," Jassy wrote in his annual shareholder letter Thursday. He also revealed the company's chip business is already running at more than $20 billion annually, with demand so strong that current and even future generations are largely spoken for. Quartz reports: Access to Amazon's chips is currently limited to Amazon Web Services, with customers paying for cloud-based usage rather than owning any physical hardware. Selling to AWS and external customers alike, as standalone chipmakers do, would put annual revenue at around $50 billion, up from the $20 billion the company estimates for the year, Jassy said. The $20 billion figure spans three product lines: Trainium, the AI accelerator chip; Graviton, a general-purpose processor; and Nitro, a chip that helps run Amazon's EC2 server instances. All three are growing at triple-digit rates year over year, Jassy claimed in his letter.

Jassy said demand for Trainium has outpaced supply at each generation. Trainium2 is essentially unavailable, with its entire allocated capacity spoken for. Trainium3 started reaching customers in early 2026, and reservations have filled nearly all available supply. Even Trainium4 -- which is not expected to reach wide release for another year and a half -- has substantial pre-orders committed. Jassy argued that a full-scale Trainium rollout could shave tens of billions off annual capital costs while meaningfully widening profit margin.

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OpenAI is reportedly preparing a new cybersecurity product for a small group of partners, out of concern that a broader rollout could wreak havoc if it were released more widely. If that move sounds familiar, it's because Anthropic took a similar limited-release approach with its Mythos model and Project Glasswing initiative. Axios reports: OpenAI introduced its "Trusted Access for Cyber" pilot program in February after rolling out GPT-5.3-Codex, the company's most cyber-capable reasoning model. Organizations in the invite-only program are given access to "even more cyber capable or permissive models to accelerate legitimate defensive work," according to a blog post. At the time, OpenAI committed $10 million in API credits to participants. [...]

Restricting the rollout of a new frontier model makes "more sense" if companies are concerned about models' ability to write new exploits -- rather than about their ability to find bugs in the first place, Stanislav Fort, CEO of security firm Aisle, told Axios. Staggering the release of new AI models looks a lot like how cybersecurity vendors currently handle the disclosure of security flaws in software, Lee added. "It's the same debate we've had for decades around responsible vulnerability disclosure," Lee said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data -- including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics -- from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China. The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin -- a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.

Cyber experts who have spoken to the alleged hacker and reviewed samples of the stolen data they posted online say they appeared to gain entry to the massive computer with comparative ease and were able to siphon out huge amounts of data over the course of multiple months without being detected. An account calling itself FlamingChina posted a sample of the alleged dataset on an anonymous Telegram channel on February 6, claiming it contained "research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more." The group alleges the information is linked to "top organizations" including the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, and the National University of Defense Technology.

Cyber security experts who have reviewed the data say the group is offering a limited preview of the alleged dataset, for thousands of dollars, with full access priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Payment was requested in cryptocurrency. CNN cannot verify the origins of the alleged dataset and the claims made by FlamingChina, but spoke with multiple experts whose initial assessment of the leak indicated it was genuine. The alleged sample data appeared to include documents marked "secret" in Chinese, along with technical files, animated simulations and renderings of defense equipment including bombs and missiles.

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After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. "This isn't a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue," the digital rights group said. "The math hasn't worked out for a while now." From the report: We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. [...]

When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.

EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members' support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we're here to help you take back control.

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Hostile Volume is a simple and maddening game where you need to hold the audio volume at 25%, which gets increasingly difficult with each level.

International Chess Federation Adds Race Car Piece. “The race car piece gets to go twice in one turn because it’s so fast.” Smart to capitalize on F1’s popularity; they should do my fave Monopoly piece next (the iron).

The moonlight ain’t so great, Ivan Marchuk

Weekend plans, Austin Leong

Red dust, Larry Niehues

Firestarter, Rinko Kawauchi

Firetruck! Charles Ray

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, March 1966

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

BertvB posted a photo:

BRIGHTON (ANP) - Darter Michael van Gerwen heeft in de tiende speelronde van de Premier League Gian van Veen verslagen. De 36-jarige Brabander zette zijn landgenoot in Brighton met 6-4 aan de kant.

Later op donderdag treft Van Gerwen in de halve finale de Engelsman Stephen Bunting, die verraste met een zege op Luke Littler (6-4). De andere halve finale gaat tussen de Welshman Jonny Clayton en de Noord-Ier Josh Rock.

Littler leidde na negen speelronden in de Premier League met 21 punten. Van Gerwen en Van Veen begonnen de speelronde in Brighton als nummers 4 en 5 met respectievelijk 13 en 12 punten.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn donderdag opnieuw met winsten de handel uitgegaan. De beursdag begon nog met verliezen. Maar die werden in de loop van de sessie weggewerkt, nadat de Israëlische premier Benjamin Netanyahu had verklaard dat Israël wil beginnen met onderhandelingen met Libanon. Daardoor hebben beleggers meer hoop gekregen dat het staakt-het-vuren in het Midden-Oosten zal standhouden.

De Dow-Jonesindex steeg 0,6 procent tot 48.185,80 punten. De brede S&P 500 won 0,6 procent tot 6824,66 punten en techbeurs Nasdaq kreeg er 0,8 procent bij op 22.822,42 punten. De wapenstilstand in het Midden-Oosten zorgde woensdag ook al voor opluchting op Wall Street. De belangrijkste graadmeters stegen toen tot bijna 3 procent.

"Voor de markt doet weinig anders ertoe dan de duurzaamheid van het staakt-het-vuren, het scheepvaartvolume door de Straat van Hormuz en uiteindelijk of er een echte permanente deal wordt gesloten", zei een deskundige van de firma Janus Henderson tegen persbureau Bloomberg.

Olieprijzen

De olieprijzen liepen wel weer verder op. Amerikaanse olie werd ruim 4 procent duurder en een vat Brent, de maatstaf voor olie uit het Midden-Oosten en de Noordzee, ging bijna 2 procent in prijs omhoog. Beide werden nog wel op minder dan 100 dollar per vat verhandeld.

Olieconcern Chevron hoorde niettemin bij de verliezers, met een koersverlies van ruim 1 procent. Chevron zei dat zijn productie in het eerste kwartaal met wel 6 procent daalde, deels door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. Eerder deze week kwam branchegenoot ExxonMobil (min 0,8 procent) al met een vergelijkbaar bericht.

Cijfers Amerikaanse economie

Inmiddels is duidelijk dat aanvallen op Saudische energiefaciliteiten de olieproductiecapaciteit van Saudi-Arabië met ongeveer 600.000 vaten per dag hebben verminderd en de doorvoer van de Oost-West-pijplijn met zo'n 700.000 vaten per dag. Die cijfers heeft het Saudische staatspersbureau naar buiten gebracht.

Amazon won juist bijna 6 procent aan beurswaarde. Topman Andy Jassy verklaarde dat zijn bedrijf overweegt om zijn chips van de interne chipactiviteiten ook te gaan verkopen aan andere bedrijven. De topman zei dat de chiptak een jaaromzet van 50 miljard dollar zou kunnen hebben als het een zelfstandig bedrijf was dat halfgeleiders verkocht aan AWS-klanten en andere externe partijen.

Beleggers verwerkten ook bijgewerkte cijfers over de Amerikaanse economie. Die blijkt in de laatste maanden van vorig jaar bij nader inzien in een langzamer tempo gegroeid dan eerder gemeld.

WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR/AFP) - Libanon en Israël onderhandelen volgende week in Washington, meldt het Amerikaanse ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken. De gesprekken zouden naar verwachting gaan plaatsvinden op het ministerie.

Eerder meldden verschillende media al dat de gesprekken onder toezicht van de Amerikanen zouden plaatsvinden en worden geleid door de Libanese oud-ambassadeur in Washington, Simon Karam.

Volgens Israël geldt een eerder overeengekomen staakt-het-vuren tussen Iran en de VS niet voor Libanon. Israël voerde grootschalige aanvallen op Libanon uit, waarbij honderden doden vielen. Donderdag lieten beide landen weten met elkaar te willen praten.

Israël en Libanon hebben geen diplomatieke banden en gaan niet vaak direct met elkaar in gesprek.

The only rookie on the F1 grid this season, but Racing Bulls’ new star is already making a name for himself.