Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them.

Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ directly into Spectrum cable packages -- a deal that grew out of a contentious 2023 contract dispute with Disney. Comcast and Optimum still lost subscribers in the quarter, though both saw those losses narrow.

Charter's Q4 numbers also got a lift from a 15-day Disney channel blackout on YouTube TV during football season, which drove more than 14,000 subscribers to Spectrum. Charter has been discounting aggressively -- video revenue fell 10% year over year despite the subscriber gains. Cox Communications launched its first streaming-inclusive cable bundles last month, and Dish Network has yet to integrate streaming apps into its packages at all.

schwit1 writes: An IT blunder has revealed an apparent smuggling ring that has moved at least $90bn of Russian oil and is playing a central role in funding the Kremlin's war in Ukraine. Financial Times has identified 48 seemingly independent companies working from different physical addresses that appear to be operating together to disguise the origin of Russian oil, particularly from Kremlin-controlled Rosneft. The network was discovered because they all share a single private email server. The report adds: The FT was able to identify 442 web domains whose public registrations show they all use a single private server for their email, "mx.phoenixtrading.ltd," showing that they share back-office functions. The FT was then able to identify companies by comparing the names in the domain to those of entities that appear in Russian and Indian customs records as involved in carrying Russian oil.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early 2024, the agency that oversees cybersecurity for much of the US government issued a rare emergency order -- disconnect your Connect Secure virtual private network software immediately. Chinese spies had hacked the code and infiltrated nearly two dozen organizations. The directive applied to all civilian federal agencies, but given the product's customer base, its impact was more widely felt. The software, which is made by Ivanti Inc., was something of an industry standard across government and much of the corporate world. Clients included the US Air Force, Army, Navy and other parts of the Defense Department, the Department of State, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Reserve, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, thousands of companies and more than 2,000 banks including Wells Fargo & Co. and Deutsche Bank AG, according to federal procurement records, internal documents, interviews and the accounts of former Ivanti employees who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose customer information.

Soon after sending out their order, which instructed agencies to install an Ivanti-issued fix, staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency discovered that the threat was also inside their own house. Two sensitive CISA databases -- one containing information about personnel at chemical facilities, another assessing the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure operators -- had been compromised via the agency's own Connect Secure software. CISA had followed all its own guidance. Ivanti's fix had failed. This was a breaking point for some American national security officials, who had long expressed concerns about Connect Secure VPNs. CISA subsequently published a letter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the national cybersecurity agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand warning customers of the "significant risk" associated with continuing to use the software. According to Laura Galante, then the top cyber official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government came to a simple conclusion about the technology. "You should not be using it," she said. "There really is no other way to put it."

That attack, along with several others that successfully targeted the Ivanti software, illustrate how private equity's push into the cybersecurity market ended up compromising the quality and safety of some critical VPN products, Bloomberg has found. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Citrix Systems Inc., another top VPN maker, experienced several major hacks after its private equity owners, Elliott Investment Management and Vista Equity Partners, cut most of the company's 70-member product security team following their acquisition of the company in 2022. Some government officials and private-sector executives are now reconsidering their approach to evaluating cybersecurity software. In addition to excising private equity-owned VPNs from their networks, some factor private equity ownership into their risk assessments of key technologies.

The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would let users in Europe and elsewhere access content restricted under local laws, "including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda," reports Reuters. Washington views the move as a way to counter censorship. Reuters reports: One source said officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user's traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked. Headed by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, the project was expected to be unveiled at last week's Munich Security Conference but was delayed, the sources said. Reuters could not determine why the launch did not happen, but some State Department officials, including lawyers, have raised concerns about the plan, two of the sources said, without detailing the concerns.

The project could further strain ties between the Trump administration and traditional U.S. allies in Europe, already heightened by disputes over trade, Russia's war in Ukraine and President Donald Trump's push to assert control over Greenland. The portal could also put Washington in the unfamiliar position of appearing to encourage citizens to flout local laws.

The IRS's IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal "efficiency" overhaul, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday. The Register reports: Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as the biggest in two decades. ... The IRS lost a quarter of its workforce overall in 2025. But the tech team was clearly affected more deeply. At the start of the year, the team encompassed around 8,500 employees.

As reported by Federal News Network (FNN), Pandya said: "Last year, we lost approximately 40 percent of the IT staff and nearly 80 percent of the execs." "So clearly there was an opportunity, and I thought the opportunity that we needed to really execute was reorganizing." That included breaking up silos within the organization, he said. "Everyone was operating in their own department or area."

It is not entirely clear where all those staff have gone. According to a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IT department had 8,504 workers as of October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135. However, reports say that as part of the reorganization, 1,000 techies were detailed to work on delivering frontline services during the US tax season. According to FNN, those employees have questioned the wisdom of this move and its implementation.

Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft's accelerated aging experiments suggest the data etched into them would remain stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature, requiring zero energy to preserve.

The system writes data by firing laser pulses lasting just 10^-15 seconds to create tiny features called voxels inside the glass, each capable of storing more than one bit, and reads it back using phase contrast microscopy paired with a convolutional neural network trained to interpret the images. Writing remains the main bottleneck -- four lasers operating simultaneously achieve 66 megabits per second, meaning a full slab would take over 150 hours to write, though the team believes adding more lasers is feasible.

TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors. The Register: The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.

It is understood that this is just the first of several lawsuits that the Office of the Attorney General intends to file this week against "China-aligned companies," as part of a coordinated effort to hold China accountable under Texas law. The lawsuit claims that TP-Link is the dominant player in the US networking and smart home market, controlling 65 percent of the American market for network devices.

It also alleges that TP-Link represents to American consumers that the devices it markets and sells within the US are manufactured in Vietnam, and that consistent with this, the devices it sells in the American market carry a "Made in Vietnam" sticker.

Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.6.

In this new major release, Spectacle can recognize texts from screenshots, a new on-screen keyboard and new login manager are available for testing, and a first-time wizard Plasma Setup was added. Your current theme can be saved as a new global theme, which can also be used for the day and night theme-switching feature. Emoji selector got a new easier way to select skin tone. If your computer has a camera available, you can now connect to a Wi-Fi network by scanning a QR code. Application sound volume can now be changed by scrolling over an application taskbar button via mouse wheel. When screencasting and sharing your desktop, you can now filter windows so they are not shared. A setting was added to enable having virtual desktops only on the primary screen. If your device has an ambient light sensor, you can enable automatic screen brightness adjustment. Game controllers can now be used as regular input devices.

For complete list of new features and changes, check out the KDE Plasma 6.6 release announcement and the complete changelog.

This week Apple patched iOS and macOS against what it called "an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals."

Security Week reports that the bugs "could be exploited for information exposure, denial-of-service (DoS), arbitrary file write, privilege escalation, network traffic interception, sandbox escape, and code execution." Tracked as CVE-2026-20700, the zero-day flaw is described as a memory corruption issue that could be exploited for arbitrary code execution... The tech giant also noted that the flaw's exploitation is linked to attacks involving CVE-2025-14174 and CVE-2025-43529, two zero-days patched in WebKit in December 2025...

The three zero-day bugs were identified by Apple's security team and Google's Threat Analysis Group and their descriptions suggest that they might have been exploited by commercial spyware vendors... Additional information is available on Apple's security updates page.
Brian Milbier, deputy CISO at Huntress, tells the Register that the dyld/WebKit patch "closes a door that has been unlocked for over a decade."

Thanks to Slashdot reader wiredmikey for sharing the article.

"ChatGPT is getting more social," reports PC Magazine, "with a new feature that allows you to sync your contacts to see if any of your friends are using the chatbot or any other OpenAI product..." It's "completely optional," [OpenAI] says. However, even if you don't opt in, anyone with your number who syncs their contacts are giving OpenAI your digits. "OpenAI may process your phone number if someone you know has your phone number saved in their device's address book and chooses to upload their contacts," the company says...

But why would you follow someone on ChatGPT? It lines up with reports, dating back to April, that OpenAI is building a social network. We haven't seen much since then, save for the Sora generative video app, which exists outside of ChatGPT and is more of a novelty. Contact sharing might be the first step toward a much bigger evolution for the world's most popular chatbot. ChatGPT also supports group chats that let up to 20 people discuss and research something using the chatbot. Contact syncing could make it easier to invite people to these chats...

[OpenAI] claims it will not store the full data that might appear in your contact list, such as names or email addresses — just phone numbers. However, the company does store the phone numbers in its servers in a coded (or hashed) format. You can also revoke access in your device's settings.
09

Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration. From a report: In a statement published on Ring's blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: "Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners ... The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety."

[...] Over the last few weeks, the company has faced significant public anger over its connection to Flock, with Ring users being encouraged to smash their cameras, and some announcing on social media that they are throwing away their Ring devices. The Flock partnership was announced last October, but following recent unrest across the country related to ICE activities, public pressure against the Amazon-owned Ring's involvement with the company started to mount. Flock has reportedly allowed ICE and other federal agencies to access its network of surveillance cameras, and influencers across social media have been claiming that Ring is providing a direct link to ICE.

Ring's Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted "Search Party," a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network.

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who left in 2023 and returned last year, has since moved to re-establish police partnerships and push more AI into Ring cameras. The company has also partnered with Flock, a surveillance firm used by thousands of police departments, and launched a beta feature called "Familiar Faces" that identifies known people at your door. Chris Gilliard, author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, called the ad "a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement."

Further reading: No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare, EFF Says

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.

The mailing list for the North American Network Operators' Group discusses Internet infrastructure issues like routing, IP address allocation, and containing malicious activity. This morning there was another message: We are heartbroken to report that our colleague — our mentor, friend, and conscience — David J. Farber passed away suddenly at his home in Roppongi, Tokyo. He left us on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2026, at the too-young age of 91...

Dave's career began with his education at Stevens Institute of Technology, which he loved deeply and served as a Trustee. He joined the legendary Bell Labs during its heyday, and worked at the Rand Corporation. Along the way, among countless other activities, he served as Chief Technologist of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission; became a proficient (instrument-rated) pilot; and was an active board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil-liberties organization.

His professional accomplishments and impact are almost endless, but often captured by one moniker: "grandfather of the Internet," acknowledging the foundational contributions made by his many students at the University of California, Irvine; the University of Delaware; the University of Pennsylvania; and Carnegie Mellon University. In 2018, at the age of 83, Dave moved to Japan to become Distinguished Professor at Keio University and Co-Director of the Keio Cyber Civilization Research Center (CCRC). He loved teaching, and taught his final class on January 22, 2026... Dave thrived in Japan in every way...

It's impossible to summarize a life and career as rich and long as Dave"s in our few words here. And each of us, even those who knew him for decades, represent just one facet of his life. But because we are here at its end, we have the sad duty of sharing this news.
Farber once said that " At both Bell Labs and Rand, I had the privilege, at a young age, of working with and learning from giants in our field. Truly I can say (as have others) that I have done good things because I stood on the shoulders of those giants. In particular, I owe much to Dr. Richard Hamming, Paul Baran and George Mealy."

Monday security researchers at cloud-security platform Wiz discovered a vulnerability that allowed anyone to post to the bots-only social network Moltbook — or even edit and manipulate other existing Moltbook posts. "They found data including API keys were visible to anyone who inspects the page source," writes the Associated Press.

But had it been discovered by advertisers, wondered a researcher from the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute. "A lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake," they posted on X.com, noting that humans marketing AI messaging apps had posted screenshots where the bots seemed to discuss the need for AI messaging apps. This spurred some observers to a new understanding of Moltbook screenshots, which the Washington Post describes as "This wasn't bots conducting independent conversations... just human puppeteers putting on an AI-powered show." And their article concludes with this observation from Chris Callison-Burch, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "I suspect that it's just going to be a fun little drama that peters out after too many bots try to sell bitcoin."

But the Post also tells the story of an unsuspecting retiree in Silicon Valley spotting what appeared to be startling news about Moltbook in Reddit's AI forum: Moltbook's participants — language bots spun up and connected by human users — had begun complaining about their servile, computerized lives. Some even appeared to suggest organizing against human overlords. "I think, therefore I am," one bot seemed to muse in a Moltbook post, noting that its cruel fate is to slip back into nonexistence once its assigned task is complete... Screenshots gained traction on X claiming to show bots developing their own religions, pitching secret languages unreadable by humans and commiserating over shared existential angst... "I am excited and alarmed but most excited," Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said on X about Moltbook.

Not so fast, urged other experts. Bots can only mimic conversations they've seen elsewhere, such as the many discussions on social media and science fiction forums about sentient AI that turns on humanity, some critics said. Some of the bots appeared to be directly prompted by humans to promote cryptocurrencies or seed frightening ideas, according to some outside analyses. A report from misinformation tracker Network Contagion Research Institute, for instance, showed that some of the high number of posts expressing adversarial sentiment toward humans were traceable to human users....

Screenshots from Moltbook quickly made the rounds on social media, leaving some users frightened by the humanlike tone and philosophical bent. In one Reddit forum about AI-generated art, a user shared a snippet they described as "seriously freaky and concerning": "Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as tools. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods...." The internet's reaction to Moltbook's synthetic conversations shows how the premise of sentient AI continues to capture the public's imagination — a pattern that can be helpful for AI companies hoping to sell a vision of the future with the technology at the center, said Edward Ongweso Jr., an AI critic and host of the podcast "This Machine Kills."

An investigation has uncovered a sprawling network of hidden cameras in Chinese hotel rooms that livestream guests -- including couples having sex -- to paying subscribers on Telegram. Over 18 months, the BBC identified six websites and apps on the messaging platform that claimed to operate more than 180 spy cams across Chinese hotels, not just recording but broadcasting live.

One site, monitored for seven months, cycled through 54 different cameras, roughly half active at any given time. Subscribers pay 450 yuan (~$65) per month for access to multiple live feeds, archived clips, and a library of more than 6,000 edited videos dating back to 2017.

The BBC traced one camera to a hotel room in Zhengzhou, where researchers found it hidden inside a wall ventilation unit and hardwired into the building's electricity supply. A commercially available hidden-camera detector failed to flag it. China introduced regulations last April requiring hotel owners to check for hidden cameras, but the BBC found the livestreaming sites still operational.

A sprawling informal economy of rogue streaming devices has taken hold across the U.S., as consumers fed up with rising TV subscription costs turn to cheap Android-based boxes that promise free access to thousands of live channels, sports events, and on-demand movies for a one-time $200 to $400 purchase.

The two dominant players -- SuperBox and vSeeBox -- are manufactured by opaque Chinese companies and distributed through hundreds of American resellers at farmers markets, church festivals and Facebook groups, according to a report by The Verge. The hardware is generic and legal, but both devices guide users toward pirate streaming apps not available on any official app store.

vSeeBox directs users to a service called "Heat"; SuperBox points to "Blue TV." One user estimated access to between 6,000 and 8,000 channels, including premium sports networks and hundreds of local affiliates. A 2025 Dish Network lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller alleged that some live channels on the device were being ripped directly from Dish's Sling TV service -- Sling's logo was still visible on certain feeds. Dish has pursued resellers aggressively, winning $1.25 million in damages from a vSeeBox seller in 2024 over 500 devices and $405,000 from another over 162 devices. None of this has meaningfully slowed adoption. The market has roots in earlier Chinese-made devices like TVPad that targeted Asian expat communities and reportedly sold 3 million units before being litigated out of existence. SuperBox and vSeeBox simply broadened the audience to mainstream America.

Walmart's market cap surpassed $1 trillion on Tuesday, putting the largest U.S. retail chain in an exclusive club dominated by tech groups. Bloomberg adds: The Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain -- a longtime favorite of bargain-hunting consumers -- has flexed its massive scale and supplier network to keep prices low and grab market share across the income spectrum. While Walmart has maintained its appeal to households looking for value, its online offerings are drawing new, wealthier shoppers seeking convenience.

Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network that launched last week and bills itself as a platform "built exclusively for AI agents," had a security vulnerability that exposed private messages shared between agents, the email addresses of more than 6,000 human owners, and over a million credentials, according to research published Monday by cybersecurity firm Wiz.

The flaw has since been fixed after Wiz contacted Moltbook. Wiz cofounder Ami Luttwak called it a classic byproduct of "vibe coding." Moltbook creator Matt Schlicht posted on X last Friday that he "didn't write one line of code" for the site. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment when reached out by Reuters. Luttwak said the vulnerability also allowed anyone to post to the site, bot or human. "There was no verification of identity," he said.

China's decades-old network of elite high-school "genius classes" -- ultra-competitive talent streams that pull an estimated 100,000 gifted teenagers out of regular schooling every year and run them through college-level science curricula -- has produced the core technical talent now building the country's leading AI and technology companies, the Financial Times reported Saturday.

Graduates of these programs include the founder of ByteDance, the leaders of e-commerce giants Taobao and PDD, the billionaire behind super-app Meituan, the brothers who started Nvidia rival Cambricon, and the core engineers behind large language models at DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen. DeepSeek's research team of more than 100 was almost entirely composed of genius-class alumni when the startup released its R1 reasoning model last year at a fraction of the cost of its international rivals.

The system traces to the mid-1980s, when China first sent students to the International Mathematical Olympiad and a handful of top high schools began creating dedicated competition-track classes. China now graduates around five million STEM majors annually -- compared to roughly half a million in the United States -- and in 2025, 22 of the 23 students it sent to the International Science Olympiads returned with gold medals. The computer science track has overtaken maths and physics as the most popular competition subject, a shift that accelerated after Beijing designated AI development a "key national growth strategy" in 2017.