Microsoft has [1]patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11's Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday update, stemmed from Notepad's relatively new Markdown support -- a feature Microsoft added after [2]discontinuing WordPad and rewriting Notepad to serve as both a plain text and rich text editor. An attacker only needed to create a Markdown file containing file:// links pointing to executables or special URIs like ms-appinstaller://, and a Ctrl+click in Markdown mode would launch them. Microsoft's fix now displays a warning dialog for any link that doesn't use http:// or https://, though the company did not explain why it chose a prompt over blocking non-standard links entirely. Notepad updates automatically through the Microsoft Store.



[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-11-notepad-flaw-let-files-execute-silently-via-markdown-links/

[2] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/03/0050200/after-28-years-microsoft-announces-it-will-remove-wordpad-from-windows

IBM said it will [1]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."



[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-12/ibm-plans-to-triple-entry-level-hiring-in-the-us-in-2026

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> Just weeks after a dramatic purge of China's top general, the CIA is moving to capitalize on any resulting discord with [1]a new public video targeting potential informants in the Chinese military . The U.S. spy agency on Thursday rolled out the video depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military officer, in the latest U.S. step in a campaign to ramp up human intelligence gathering on Washington's strategic rival.

>

> It follows a similar effort last May that focused on fictional figures within China's ruling Communist Party that provided detailed Chinese-language instructions on how to securely contact U.S. intelligence. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement that the agency's videos had reached many Chinese citizens and that it would continue offering Chinese government officials an "opportunity to work toward a brighter future together."



[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/cia-makes-new-push-recruit-chinese-military-officers-informants-2026-02-12/

WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to [1]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.



[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/automattic-planned-to-target-10-competitors-with-royalty-fees-wp-engine-claims-in-new-filing/

Anthropic has [1]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 [2]$15 billion commitment from Microsoft and Nvidia announced late last year.



[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/anthropic-valued-380-billion-latest-funding-round-2026-02-12/

[2] https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/18/1522245/microsoft-nvidia-commit-up-to-15-billion-investment-in-anthropic-as-claude-scales-on-azure

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> Palo Alto Networks [1]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 [2]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.



[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/palo-alto-chose-not-tie-china-hacking-campaign-fear-retaliation-beijing-sources-2026-02-12/

[2] https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/14/1833237/beijing-tells-chinese-firms-to-stop-using-us-and-israeli-cybersecurity-software

Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, [1]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."



[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-announces-new-mobile-style-windows-security-controls/

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 [1]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.



[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/trump-administration-el-paso-airspace-closure-questions.html

Amazon engineers have [1]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.



[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-engineers-grate-against-internal-limits-claude-code-kiro-ai-2026-2

The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will [1]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.



[1] https://www.randalolson.com/2026/02/07/the-are-you-sure-problem-why-your-ai-keeps-changing-its-mind/

AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report:

> Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to [1]"estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid.

>

> In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right."



[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/anthropic-cover-costs-electricity-price-increases-data-centers-rcna258554

Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report:

> The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, [1]raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make.

>

> Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn't the "primary beneficiary" of this entity and so didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet.

>

> Meta's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its report, EY said auditing Meta's decision "was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE's economic performance."



[1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/jobs-report-unemployment-stock-market-02-11-2026/card/meta-auditor-ey-raised-red-flag-on-data-center-accounting-TrOVlxGZGnL37d8Dv01h?msockid=3de702e14e97667e2e0717d14fc1671e

Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchant, [1]sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world."

Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales between 2022 and 2025. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday ahead of his anticipated February 24 sentencing in a Washington, D.C., federal court, the Justice Department asked the judge for nine years in prison, $35 million in restitution, and a maximum fine of $250,000.

Prosecutors described the unnamed Russian buyer -- believed to be Operation Zero, which publicly claims to sell only to the Russian government -- as "one of the world's most nefarious exploit brokers." Williams chose it because, by his own admission, "he knew they paid the most." He also oversaw the wrongful firing of a subordinate who was blamed for the theft.



[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/doj-says-trenchant-boss-sold-exploits-to-russian-broker-capable-of-accessing-millions-of-computers-and-devices/

Apple's long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and [1]spread them across later releases , Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri -- first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 -- struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and sometimes falls back on OpenAI's ChatGPT instead of Apple's own technology, the report said. Apple has instructed engineers to begin testing new Siri capabilities on iOS 26.5 instead, due in May, and internal builds of that update include a settings toggle labeled "preview" for the personal data features. A more ambitious chatbot-style Siri code-named Campo, powered by Google servers and a custom Gemini model, is in development for iOS 27 in September.



[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-latest-attempt-launch-siri-195328719.html

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying [1]the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances . Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks.

>

> Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firms, citing concerns about catastrophic risks.



[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/02/11/2026/anthropic-safety-researcher-quits-warning-world-is-in-peril

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: [1]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 : [2]No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare, EFF Says



[1] https://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/02/no-one-including-our-furry-friends-will-be-safer-rings-surveillance-nightmare-0

[1]BrianFagioli writes:

> The Linux Mint developers say they are [2]considering adopting a longer development cycle , arguing that the project's current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process "works very well" and delivers steady improvements, they admit it consumes significant time in testing, fixing, and shipping, potentially capping ambition.

>

> Mint's next release will be based on a new Ubuntu LTS, and the team says it is seriously interested in stretching the development window. The stated goal is to free up resources for more substantial development rather than constant release management. Whether this signals bigger technical changes or simply acknowledges bandwidth limits for a small team remains unclear, but it marks a notable rethink of one of desktop Linux's most consistent release rhythms.



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

[2] https://nerds.xyz/2026/02/linux-mint-longer-development-cycle/

The world is closer than thought to a "point of no return" after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. From a report:

> Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to [1]a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops , they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish "hothouse Earth" climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach.

>

> The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed. At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, "the economy and society will cease to function as we know it," scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery. The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said.

>

> The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed. It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockstrom at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.



[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of-no-return-hothouse-earth-global-heating-climate-tipping-points

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> The U.S. economy experienced [1]almost zero job growth in 2025 , according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: hiring has picked up in 2026. Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data, and found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs in all of 2025. This is far fewer than the 1.46 million jobs that were added in 2024.

>

> One bright spot was last month, when hiring increased by 130,000 roles. This was significantly more than the 55,000 additions that had been expected by economists. "Job gains occurred in health care, social assistance, and construction, while federal government and financial activities lost jobs," BLS said in a statement.



[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/january-jobs-revisions-trump-rcna258398

Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but [1]a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems -- solar panels, batteries and an inverter -- could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent [2]by 2040 .

The analysis considered total cost of ownership including sticker price, financing and fuel or charging costs, but excluded policy-related factors like taxes and subsidies. Electric two-wheelers could reach cost parity even sooner, by the end of the decade, thanks to smaller battery packs.

Small cars remain the toughest segment. The biggest obstacle is financing: in some African countries, political instability and economic uncertainty push borrowing costs so high that interest on an EV loan can exceed the vehicle's purchase price. South Africa, Mauritius and Botswana are already near the financing conditions needed for cost parity; countries like Sudan and Ghana would need drastic cuts.



[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01955-x

[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/11/1132714/evs-africa-cost/