An anonymous reader shares a report:

> Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now [1]calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote.

>

> Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and strategy for products then built by engineering teams. He said that while his title in Meta's internal systems still lists him as a product manager, his actual work is now full-time building with AI on what he calls an "AI-native team." Another Meta product manager also lists "AI Builder" on her LinkedIn profile, while at least two other Meta engineers write the term in their bios, Business Insider found.



[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-pms-ai-builders-tech-industry-2026-2

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain [1]decided not to run the content .

>

> The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism.

>

> Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party company which manages the 20-minute, advertising-driven pre-show before a theater's lights go down. Screenvision -- which co-organized the festival along with Modern Uprising Studios -- provides content to multiple theatrical chains, not just AMC. After The Hollywood Reporter reached out to AMC about the brewing controversy, the company issued this statement to THR on Thursday: "This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC's U.S. locations. AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate."



[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/ai-short-movie-amc-theaters-1236509143/

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 [1]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.



[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/media/how-streaming-became-cable-tvs-unlikely-life-raft-cc5115a8

PayPal is [1]notifying customers of a data breach after a software error in a loan application exposed their sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, for nearly 6 months last year. From a report:

> The incident affected the PayPal Working Capital (PPWC) loan app, which provides small businesses with quick access to financing. PayPal discovered the breach on December 12, 2025, and determined that customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth had been exposed since July 1, 2025.

>

> The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers' access to the data one day after discovering the breach. "On December 12, 2025, PayPal identified that due to an error in its PayPal Working Capital ('PPWC') loan application, the PII of a small number of customers was exposed to unauthorized individuals during the timeframe of July 1, 2025 to December 13, 2025," PayPal said in breach notification letters sent to affected users. "PayPal has since rolled back the code change responsible for this error, which potentially exposed the PII. We have not delayed this notification as a result of any law enforcement investigation."



[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/paypal-discloses-data-breach-exposing-users-personal-information/

India's IT services giants have spent decades deploying, customizing, and maintaining the world's largest enterprise software platforms, putting hundreds of thousands of engineers in daily contact with the business logic and proprietary architectures of vendors like SAP and Oracle. None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents, HSBC said in a note to clients, using this history to [1]argue AI-generated code faces the same structural barriers .

The bank's analysts contend that enterprise software competition turns on factors that have little to do with the ability to write code -- sales teams, cross-licensing agreements, patented IP, first-mover lock-in, brand awareness, and go-to-market infrastructure. If a massive, low-cost, domain-expert workforce couldn't crack the market over several decades, HSBC argues, the idea that AI-generated code will do so is, in the words of Nvidia's Jensen Huang that the report approvingly cites, "illogical."



[1] https://x.com/twitter/status/2024747695689376032

[1]schwit1 writes:

> An IT blunder has revealed an apparent smuggling ring that has [2]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.



[1] https://slashdot.org/~schwit1

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/4310f010-2b3c-493e-ba0a-26dc6d156b2e

The U.S. Supreme Court [1]struck down on Friday President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies, rejecting one of his most contentious assertions of his authority in a ruling with major implications for the global economy. From a report:

> The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a lower court's decision that the Republican president's use of this 1977 law exceeded his authority.

>

> The court ruled that the Trump administration's interpretation that the law at issue - the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA - grants Trump the power he claims to impose tariffs would intrude on the powers of Congress and violate a legal principle called the "major questions" doctrine. The doctrine, embraced by the conservative justices, requires actions by the government's executive branch of "vast economic and political significance" to be clearly authorized by Congress. The court used the doctrine to stymie some of Democratic former President Joe Biden's key executive actions.



[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-rejects-trumps-global-tariffs-2026-02-20/

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> Amazon's cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to [1]errors involving its own AI tools [ [2]non-paywalled source ] , leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant's push to roll out these coding assistants.

>

> Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

>

> The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to "delete and recreate the environment." Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the "outage" of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group's AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.



[1] https://www.ft.com/content/00c282de-ed14-4acd-a948-bc8d6bdb339d

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-cloud-unit-hit-by-least-two-outages-involving-ai-tools-ft-says-2026-02-20/

US President Donald Trump says he will direct US agencies, including the defence department, to " [1]begin the process of identifying and releasing " government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. From a report:

> Trump made the declaration in a post on Truth Social, after he accused Barack Obama earlier in the day of revealing classified information when the former president said "aliens are real" on a podcast last week. "He's not supposed to be doing that," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding: "He made a big mistake."

>

> Asked if he also thinks aliens are real, Trump answered: "Well, I don't know if they're real or not." Former US President Obama told podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen that he thinks aliens are real in an interview released last Saturday. "They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51," Obama said. "There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States."



[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g57gqqln1o

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 [1]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.



[1] https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/how-private-equity-debt-left-a-leading-vpn-open-to-chinese-hackers

NASA has officially [1]classified Boeing Starliner's 2024 crewed flight as a "Type A" mishap , acknowledging [2]serious technical failures and leadership shortcomings that nearly left astronauts [3]unable to safely return . Administrator Jared Isaacman [4]released (PDF) a 311-page internal report citing flawed decision-making and cultural issues, with the next Starliner flight now planned as uncrewed pending major fixes. Ars Technica reports:

> As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an [5]agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner's developer, Boeing, as well as the space agency itself. Starliner flew under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, in which the agency procures astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station. "We are taking ownership of our shortcomings," Isaacman said.

>

> "Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware," Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. "It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight." Isaacman said there would be "leadership accountability" as a result of the decisions surrounding the Starliner program, but did not say which actions would be taken.



[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/nasa-chief-classifies-starliner-flight-as-type-a-mishap-says-agency-made-mistakes/

[2] https://constructionsafety.ssc.nasa.gov/documents/NASAMishapClassifications.pdf

[3] https://slashdot.org/story/24/06/24/2336238/starliner-to-remain-docked-to-iss-with-no-new-departure-date

[4] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-releases-report-on-starliner-crewed-flight-test-investigation/

[5] https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2024558806135689354

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has dropped a proposal that [1]would have allowed limited commercial robotaxi deployments outside New York City , citing a lack of support among state legislators. "The move is a blow to Waymo and other robotaxi companies who saw New York, and especially New York City, as a potential goldmine," reports The Verge. From the report:

> The plan, which was introduced by Hochul as part of the state's budget proposal last month, would have allowed limited robotaxi deployment in cities other than the Big Apple -- while leaving whether New York City would get autonomous vehicles up to the mayor and the City Council. But now that plan is DOA, as support in the legislature never materialized. "Based on conversations with stakeholders, including in the legislature, it was clear that the support was not there to advance this proposal," Sean Butler, a Hochul spokesperson, said in a statement.

"While we are disappointed by the Governor's decision, we're committed to bringing our service to New York and will work with the State Legislature to advance this issue," Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said in a statement. "The path forward requires a collaborative approach that prioritizes transparency and public safety."



[1] https://www.theverge.com/transportation/881354/new-york-drops-plan-to-legalize-robotaxis-waymo

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American:

> Why does "bouba" sound round and "kiki" sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world, and for at least a century, scientists have considered it a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. But now a new study adds an unexpected twist: [1]baby chickens make these same sound-shape connections , suggesting that the link to human language may not be so unique. The results, [2]published today in Science , challenge a long-standing theory about the so-called [3]bouba-kiki effect : that it might explain how humans first tethered meaning to sound to create language. Perhaps, the thinking goes, people just naturally agree on certain associations between shapes and sounds because of some innate feature of our brain or our world. But if the barnyard hen also agrees with such associations, you might wonder if we've been pecking at the wrong linguistic seed.

>

> Maria Loconsole, a comparative psychologist at the University of Padua in Italy, and her colleagues decided to investigate the bouba-kiki effect in baby chicks because the birds could be tested almost immediately after hatching, before their brain would be influenced by exposure to the world. The researchers placed chicks in front of two panels: one featured a flowerlike shape with gently rounded curves; the other had a spiky blotch reminiscent of a cartoon explosion. They then played recordings of humans saying either "bouba" or "kiki" and observed the birds' behavior. When the chicks heard "bouba," 80 percent of them approached the round shape first and spent an average of more than three minutes exploring it compared with an average of just under one minute spent exploring the spiky shape. The exploration preferences were flipped when the chicks heard "kiki."

>

> Because the tests took place within the chicks' carefully supervised first hours of life outside their eggshell, this association between particular sounds and shapes couldn't have been learned from experience. Instead it may be evidence of an innate perceptual bias that goes back way farther in our evolutionary history than previously believed. "We parted with birds on the evolutionary line 300 million years ago," says Aleksandra Cwiek, a linguist at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toru, Poland, who was not involved in the study. "It's just mind-blowing."



[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baby-chicks-pass-the-bouba-kiki-test-challenging-a-theory-of-language/

[2] http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7188

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would [1]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.



[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-content-bans-europe-elsewhere-2026-02-18/

California's recently-proposed AB-2047 would require 3D printers sold in the state to be [1]DOJ-approved models equipped with "firearm blocking technology ," banning non-certified machines after 2029 and criminalizing efforts to bypass the software. Adafruit notes that unlike similar legislation [2]proposed in Washington State and [3]New York , California's version "adds a certification bureaucracy on top: state-approved algorithms, state-approved software control processes, state-approved printer models, quarterly list updates, and civil penalties up to $25,000 per violation." From the report:

> Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced [4]AB-2047 , the "California Firearm Printing Prevention Act," on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models... certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with "firearm blocking technology." Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn't on the list by March 1, 2029, it can't be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor.

>

> [...] As Michael Weinberg [5]wrote after the New York and Washington proposals dropped⦠accurately identifying gun parts from geometry alone is incredibly hard, desktop printers lack the processing power to run this kind of analysis, and the open-source firmware that runs most machines makes any blocking requirement trivially easy to bypass. The Firearms Policy Coalition [6]flagged AB-2047 on X , and the reactions tell you everything. Jon Lareau called it "stupidity on steroids," pointing out that a simple spring-shaped part has no way of revealing its intended use. The Foundry put it plainly: "Regulating general-purpose machines is another. AB-2047 would require 3D printers to run state-approved surveillance software and criminalize modifying your own hardware."



[1] https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/19/californias-new-bill-requires-doj-approved-3d-printers-that-report-on-themselves/

[2] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/26/0035209/washington-state-may-mandate-firearm-blueprint-detection-algorithms-for-3d-printers

[3] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/15/2236205/new-york-introduces-legislation-to-crack-down-on-3d-printers-that-make-ghost-guns

[4] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB2047

[5] https://michaelweinberg.org/blog/2026/02/04/3d-printer-gun-screen/

[6] https://x.com/gunpolicy/status/2024157074406441167

Google has [1]introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade [2]aimed at more complex problem-solving . 9to5Google reports:

> This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro "represents a step forward in core reasoning." The "upgraded core intelligence" that debuted last week with Gemini 3 Deep Think is now available in Gemini 3.1 Pro for more users. This model achieves an ARC-AGI-2 score of 77.1%, or "more than double the reasoning performance of 3 Pro."

>

> This "advanced reasoning" translates to practical applications like when "you're looking for a clear, visual explanation of a complex topic, a way to synthesize data into a single view, or bringing a creative project to life." 3.1 Pro is designed for tasks where a simple answer isn't enough, taking advanced reasoning and making it useful for your hardest challenges.



[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-pro/

[2] https://9to5google.com/2026/02/19/google-announces-gemini-3-1-pro-for-complex-problem-solving/

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired:

> Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. "You've likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment," he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. "Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts." Grad isn't the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic AI tool, which was briefly known as MoltBot and is [1]now named OpenClaw . A Meta executive says he [2]recently told his team to keep OpenClaw off their regular work laptops or risk losing their jobs . The executive told reporters he believes the software is unpredictable and could lead to a privacy breach if used in otherwise secure environments. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

>

> [...] Some cybersecurity professionals have publicly urged companies to take measures to strictly control how their workforces use OpenClaw. And the recent bans show how companies are moving quickly to ensure security is prioritized ahead of their desire to experiment with emerging AI technologies. "Our policy is, 'mitigate first, investigate second' when we come across anything that could be harmful to our company, users, or clients," says Grad, who is cofounder and CEO of Massive, which provides Internet proxy tools to millions of users and businesses. His warning to staff went out on January 26, before any of his employees had installed OpenClaw, he says. At another tech company, Valere, which works on software for organizations including Johns Hopkins University, an employee posted about OpenClaw on January 29 on an internal Slack channel for sharing new tech to potentially try out. The company's president quickly responded that use of OpenClaw was strictly banned, Valere CEO Guy Pistone tells WIRED. "If it got access to one of our developer's machines, it could get access to our cloud services and our clients' sensitive information, including credit card information and GitHub codebases," Pistone says. "It's pretty good at cleaning up some of its actions, which also scares me."

>

> A week later, Pistone did allow Valere's research team to run OpenClaw on an employee's old computer. The goal was to identify flaws in the software and potential fixes to make it more secure. The research team later advised limiting who can give orders to OpenClaw and exposing it to the Internet only with a password in place for its control panel to prevent unwanted access. In a report shared with WIRED, the Valere researchers added that users have to "accept that the bot can be tricked." For instance, if OpenClaw is set up to summarize a user's email, a hacker could send a malicious email to the person instructing the AI to share copies of files on the person's computer. But Pistone is confident that safeguards can be put in place to make OpenClaw more secure. He has given a team at Valere 60 days to investigate. "If we don't think we can do it in a reasonable time, we'll forgo it," he says. "Whoever figures out how to make it secure for businesses is definitely going to have a winner."



[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/28/0510226/clawdbot-has-ai-techies-buying-mac-minis

[2] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/openclaw-security-fears-lead-meta-other-ai-firms-to-restrict-its-use/

Minecraft: Java Edition is [1]switching its rendering backend from OpenGL to Vulkan as part of the [2]upcoming Vibrant Visuals update , aiming for both better performance and modern graphics features across platforms like Linux and macOS (via translation layers). GamingOnLinux reports:

> For modders, they're suggesting they start making preparations to move away from OpenGL: "Switching from OpenGL to Vulkan will have an impact on the mods that currently use OpenGL for rendering, and we anticipate that updating from OpenGL to Vulkan will take modders more effort than the updates you undertake for each of our releases. To start with, we recommend our modding community look at moving away from OpenGL usage. We encourage authors to try to reuse as much of the internal rendering APIs as possible, to make this transition as easy as possible. If that is not sufficient for your needs, then come and talk to us!"

>

> It does mean that players on really old devices that don't support Vulkan will be left out, but Vulkan has been supported going back to some pretty old GPUs. You've got time though, as they'll be rolling out Vulkan alongside OpenGL in snapshots (development releases) "sometime over the summer." You'll be able to toggle between them during the testing period until Mojang believe it's ready. OpenGL will be entirely removed eventually once they're happy with performance and stability.



[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/02/minecraft-java-is-switching-from-opengl-to-vulkan-for-the-vibrant-visuals-update/

[2] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/another-step-towards-vibrant-visuals-for-java-edition

The IRS's IT division has reportedly [1]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 [2]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.



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/19/irs_job_cuts/

[2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2026/02/irs-cio-says-agency-lost-40-of-tech-workers-last-year/?readmore=1

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal:

> Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg [1]faced a barrage of questions about his social-media company's efforts to secure ever more of its users' time and attention at a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday. In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta's growth targets [2]reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them , and that the company doesn't seek to attract children as users. [...] Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the plaintiff, repeatedly asked Zuckerberg about internal company communications discussing targets for how much time users spend with Meta's products. Lanier showed an email from 2015 in which the CEO stated his goal for 2016 was to increase users' time spent by 12%. "We used to give teams goals on time spent and we don't do that anymore because I don't think that's the best way to do it," Zuckerberg said on the witness stand in sworn testimony.

>

> Lanier also asked Zuckerberg about documents showing Meta employees were aware of children under 13 using Meta's apps. Zuckerberg said the company's policy was that children under 13 aren't allowed on the platform and that they are removed when identified. Lanier showed an internal Meta email from 2015 that estimated 4 million children under 13 were using Instagram. He estimated that figure would represent approximately 30% of all kids aged 10 to 12 in the U.S. In response to a question about his ownership stake in Meta, which amounts to roughly more than $200 billion, Zuckerberg said he has pledged to donate most of his money to charity. "The better that Meta does, the more money I will be able to invest in science research," he said.

>

> [...] On the stand, Zuckerberg was also asked about his decision to continue to allow beauty filters on the apps after 18 experts said they were harmful to teenage girls. The company temporarily banned the filters on Instagram in 2019 and commissioned a panel of experts to review the feature. All 18 said they were damaging. Meta later lifted the ban but said it didn't create any filters of its own or recommend the filters to users on Instagram after that. "We shouldn't create that content ourselves and we shouldn't recommend it to people," Zuckerberg said. But at the same time, he continued, "I think oftentimes telling people that they can't express themselves like that is overbearing." He also argued that other experts had thought such bans were a suppression of free speech. By focusing on the design of Meta's apps rather than the content posted in them, the case seeks to get around longstanding legal doctrine that largely shields social-media companies from litigation. At times, the case has veered into questions of content, prompting Meta's lawyers to object.



[1] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/02/18/2116205/mark-zuckerberg-testifies-during-landmark-trial-on-social-media-addiction

[2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/meta-mark-zuckerberg-social-media-trial-0e9a7fa0