Who's gonna be the closest to the magic number?
Send me a screenshot of your counter.
If you get the actual 700,000 - its a merch goodie bag!
Thanks & Blessings, Don :0)
Nearly half of UK businesses are still getting breached, and in many cases, the attacker's big breakthrough is an employee clicking "sure, why not" on a fake login page.
The UK government's latest Cyber Security Breaches Survey, released on Thursday, puts the hit rate at 43 percent of businesses and 28 percent of charities reporting a cyber incident in the past year, equating to approximately 612,000 UK businesses and 57,000 UK charities, numbers that have barely budged since the last time it asked.
Most of these breaches do not start with anything especially cutting-edge. Phishing leads "by far," usually via impersonation emails that send staff to fake login pages or get them to click links, open attachments, or hand over sensitive information.
Everything else barely gets a look-in. Around 85 percent of businesses that reported a breach or attack said it involved phishing, leaving malware, ransomware, and unauthorized access trailing some distance behind.
Most of these unwanted calendar entries are there for phishing purposes. Most of them warn you about a “impending payment” but the difference is in the subject and the action they want the target to take. Sometimes they want you to call a number, and sometimes they invite you to an actual meeting.
We haven’t followed up on these scams, but when attackers want you to call them or join a meeting, the end goal is almost always financial. They might use a tech support scam approach and ask you to install a Remote Monitoring and Management tool, sell you an overpriced product, or simply ask for your banking details.
The sources are usually distributed as email attachments or as download links in messaging apps. READ MORE -or- contact DONLINE.
Microsoft has committed to improving the quality and reliability of Windows, and a step on the path to that goal is… encouraging a chunk of its US staff to leave the company.
As confirmed by The Register sources, the company has announced, via internal memo, a voluntary buyout scheme for US employees. So if you work in that region, are at the senior director level or below, and if your age plus years of employment at Microsoft comes to 70 or higher – you might be eligible to leap from the gangplank of the good ship Nadella rather than receiving a shove from HR.
There will be some exceptions, including employees with sales incentive plans, but a figure of approximately 7 percent is a guide to how big a chunk of the workforce could be eligible. That translates to just under 9,000 employees.
Microsoft has laid off thousands of employees in recent years. In July 2025, it cut 9,000 jobs, and later that month, the company's CEO, Satya Nadella, wrote that the terminations were "weighing heavily on me." Yeh, Satya - all the way to the bank!
As tech companies race to secure massive power deals to build out hundreds of data centers across the country, these projects represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential climate cost of the artificial intelligence boom.
Amazon has agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, on top of the $8 billion that it has poured into the artificial intelligence startup in recent years, as part of an expanded agreement to build out AI infrastructure.
In the announcement on Monday, Anthropic said it’s committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services technologies over the next 10 years, including current and future generations of Trainium, Amazon’s custom AI chips. Anthropic said it’s secured up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying its Claude AI models.
“Anthropic’s commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon, as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with generative AI,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
Wow, I remember when $1 Billion was a lot to lose!
Deezer announced on Monday that AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all new music uploaded to its platform. The company said it’s receiving almost 75,000 AI-generated tracks per day and more than two million per month.
The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
The latest figure from Deezer highlights a continuous surge in artificial intelligence - generated music uploads to the platform. Deezer reported receiving around 60,000 AI tracks per day in January, up from 50,000 in November, 30,000 in September, and just 10,000 in January 2025, when it first launched its AI-music detection tool.
JAVAAD Writes: There is a certain kind of argument that appears every time encryption comes up: Yes, yes, privacy is lovely. But think of the children!!!
And just like that, the conversation is over. Because once someone has wheeled in children, terrorists, organised crime, and a shadowy man in a basement who definitely has a beard, anyone asking awkward questions about privacy looks like they personally run a fan club for villains.
Which is a shame. Because encryption is one of those subjects where people are invited to have very strong opinions without anyone first bothering to explain what it actually does.
So let’s start there. Read this excellent & insightful article in full BY CLICKING HERE.
Streaming was supposed to be the answer to expensive TV packages and overpriced DVDs.
Now we're paying more than ever for multiple subscriptions, getting bombarded with ads, and watching lower-quality films than we had 5 years ago.
In 2012, Netflix was £5.99 a month.
One subscription, thousands of films and TV shows, no ads.
It was cheaper than renting DVDs and you could watch whatever you wanted whenever you wanted.
Now, Netflix is £12.99 a month without adverts.
Plus you need another 5 subscriptions if you want access to everything.
Films and shows are split across different platforms.
If you want to watch a specific film, you have to check five different apps to see who's got it, and half the time nobody has it and you have to rent it separately for £5.99.
On top of that, most of them now have ads.
Netflix introduced an ad-supported tier.
Amazon Prime Video added ads to their standard plan unless you pay extra to remove them.
Disney+ has ads on their cheaper tier.
We've gone full circle.
We're paying for multiple subscriptions, watching ads, and still not getting access to everything we want.
It's TV packages all over again, just more fragmented and more expensive.
And the quality has dropped.
Streaming services are churning out cheap content to fill their libraries instead of investing in good films and shows.
Half of what's available is low-budget filler nobody asked for.
Meanwhile, DVDs gave you the film, the bonus features, the director's commentary, deleted scenes.
You owned it.
You could watch it whenever you wanted without worrying about it disappearing from the platform next month.
Blockbuster and DVD rental shops weren't the problem.
Overpriced packages were.
But instead of fixing that, we've ended up with something worse.
This hack matters because CPU-Z and HWMonitor are trusted Windows tools. The attack exploited that trust, making it that much more dangerous. READ MORE...
"We feel ignored, forgotten. Like we are in the dark," says Pastor Barnabas from Nigeria, who lives in a displacement camp after narrowly surviving a violent attack.
This petition is intended to be presented to the African Union, United Nations, EU and local governments around the world in 2026. Thank you for adding your voice.
www.opendoorsuk.org
www.premierchristian.news
He's a little trooper - recovering really well already. When we picked him up on Thursday afternoon - he was still zonked from the GA they gave him. Friday he was up and about. No more cone of shame - he's got this really funky blue body suit! Get well soon buddy x
More Theodore posts on this Blog
An Anthropic engineer with zero security training asked Claude Mythos to find remote code execution bugs overnight. He woke up to a complete working exploit.
That’s the kind of model Anthropic announced on April 7. Claude Mythos Preview is, by every published benchmark, the most capable AI model ever built. It scores 93.9% on SWE-bench Verified, 97.6% on the USAMO math olympiad, and 83.1% on CyberGym. It found zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser. Fully autonomously. No human guidance needed.
Anthropic’s response to building it: don’t release it. Instead, the company launched Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity defense initiative that gives the model to Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, CrowdStrike, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Broadcom, Palo Alto Networks, and the Linux Foundation. About 40 additional organizations that maintain critical software infrastructure also get access. Anthropic is committing $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations.
This is the first time a leading AI lab has built a frontier model and simultaneously decided the public cannot use it. READ MORE...
Scottish Car Clan: After just 3 years Nissan have disabled features which helped to market and sell their cars. In this video I discuss how this is an issue we're likely to see more of as cars become more reliant on connected services and updates.
This is something I see in my day job and as a motorcyclist. Features which were supplied when you originally purchased the product - are then removed at a future point. Still want or need those features? The answer is somewhere between "tough" and "better pay us a subscription then". Shabby...
AI Overviews has had a rough time since its 2024 launch, attracting user ire over its scattershot accuracy, but it’s getting better and usually provides the right answer. That’s a low bar, though. A new analysis from The New York Times attempted to assess the accuracy of AI Overviews, finding it’s right 90 percent of the time.
The flip side is that 1 in 10 AI answers is wrong, and for Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day.
At the time, Microsoft had informed that new keys and certificates would be installed on user PCs via Windows Update, and in fact, the company has already rolled those out with the February 2026 Patch Tuesday updates.
So if you have got the latest Windows Updates installed you should be fine. Microsoft says that the new certs must be installed before June 2026, so make sure to get the February update or a later update as they are cumulative and will pack the necessary Secure Boot upgrade as well. READ MORE...
Need advice on the above? Contact Donline.
AI skeptics aren’t the only ones warning users not to unthinkingly trust models’ outputs — that’s what the AI companies say themselves in their terms of service.
Take Microsoft, which is currently focused on getting corporate customers to pay for Copilot. But it has also been getting dinged on social media over Copilot’s terms of use, which appear to have been last updated on October 24, 2025.
“Copilot is for entertainment purposes only,” the company warned. “It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” READ MORE & CAVEAT EMPTOR!
An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.
In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.
And yet we are told that self driving cars are the future. Not my future - ever!
Data centres built to power Artificial Intelligence produce so much heat that they can raise the surface temperature of the land around them by several degrees – creating so-called data centre heat islands that may already be affecting up to 340 million people.
The number of data centres built around the world is forecast to rise enormously. JLL, a real estate company, estimates that data centre capacity will double between 2025 and 2030 – with AI expected to account for half that demand.
Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to “explode” in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact.
Meanwhile, in other news: we're all being told to travel less, eat less meat, turn down our heating / air conditioning, etc... We do our bit, while big tech just burns the planet! Grrrr!
A backup is a second copy of all your important files — for example, your family photos, home videos, documents and emails. Instead of storing it all in one place (like your computer), you keep another copy of everything somewhere safe.
ALRIGHT, I GET IT, BUT WHY SHOULD I BACKUP?
Losing your files is way more common than you’d think. Ever lost your phone, camera or tablet? That counts. Your stuff could have been saved with a backup. One small accident or failure could destroy all the important stuff you care about.
30% of people have never backed up
113 phones lost or stolen every minute
29% of disasters are caused by accident
1 in 10 computers infected with viruses each month
SO HOW DO I BACKUP?
Most people backup their files in one of two ways: to an external drive, or somewhere on the Internet (Backblaze).
Almost half a million Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers saw other people's transactions or had their own data shared in a recent IT issue, the bank has revealed.
In a letter responding to the Treasury Select Committee's enquiries about the incident published on Friday, Lloyds Banking Group said it had affected up to 447,936 customers.
The UK banking giant seems to have compensated only some affected so far - with "goodwill payments" of £139,000 shared between 3,625 customers.
A cyberattack on a U.S. vehicle breathalyzer company has left drivers across the United States stranded and unable to start their vehicles.
The company, Intoxalock, says on its website that it is “currently experiencing downtime” after a cyberattack on March 14. Intoxalock sells breathalyzer devices that fit into vehicle ignition switches, and is used by people who are required to provide a negative alcohol breath sample to start their car.
Intoxalock spokesperson Rachael Larson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company had been hit by a cyberattack. Larson said the company took steps to “temporarily pause some of our systems as a precautionary measure.”
The glitch affects sign-in operations for Microsoft accounts. Businesses using Entra ID (previously known as Azure Active Directory) for application authentication are not affected.
However, users of Microsoft Teams Free, or anyone signing into Word, Excel, OneDrive, or Microsoft 365 Copilot with a Microsoft account, may see a message along the lines of "You'll need the Internet for this. It doesn't look like you're connected to the Internet" - regardless of whether the device actually is.
According to Microsoft: "This issue occurs when the device enters a specific network connectivity state, and may resolve on its own." A restart should also fix it, provided the device is online at the time.
"If the device is restarted without an active internet connection," Microsoft cautioned, "it might return to a connectivity state where the issue can occur again."
As for a fix that doesn't involve a weary reach for the big red button – virtual or otherwise – Microsoft wrote: "We are working to release a resolution for this issue in the next few days." This sounds a lot like yet another out-of-band update to deal with whatever the company broke in the March 10 update for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2.
A new report looking into the state of the roads in England and Wales has concluded that it would take 12 years of work and £18.62billion to repair all local authority-controlled tarmac in both countries.
Released on Tuesday, March 17 by the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), the Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey found that although 1.9million potholes were filled in over the past 12 months (more than 5200 per day) councils simply don’t have the budget or resources to keep up with the problem.
“I think all road users would agree that the condition of our local roads has become a national disgrace,” AIA Chair, David Giles said in the report.
Think potholes are bad if you're a car driver? Try them on a motorcycle - they could cause a serious injury or worse...
The Outlook team is working to identify the root cause of this known issue and will share more details once a fix is available.
I rode the LiveWire when it was released back in 2020. I loved it, a great bike - but the price back then was £30k - a lot of dough for a (albeit nice) one trick pony. The price dropped in Aug last year to £18,290. You can now pick one up (brand new) for £12,990 - which to be honest is a bargain!
LiveWire as a brand is doing well in the electric motorbike sector - but the numbers are paltry! Have a read of this article: "LiveWire’s 2025 financial report states that the American bikemaker sold 653 electric motorcycles in 2025 – up by 7% from 612 units in 2024".
Makes you wonder how long they can keep this up?...
Come and See: "Reveal Jesus" - a brand new taster video. It’s a compelling & commissioning depiction of how The Chosen has joined (and built upon) a long and storied history of global impact through Christian media projects.
In this 7-minute film, show creator Dallas Jenkins shares how The Chosen reveals the Jesus of the Bible in a fresh, personal, and deeply authentic way that is resonating across current generations.
“For whatever reason, this portrayal of Jesus seems to be cracking the code for people to experience a more emotional and authentic relationship with Jesus than they’ve ever had before.”
The reason RAM prices went up 4x is that a massive amount of not-yet-manufactured memory was bought with money that doesn't really exist to be put into GPUs that haven't been made yet, to be installed in AI data centers that haven't been built, powered by infrastructure that may never exist, to satisfy demand that isn't actually there, in order to generate profits that are mathematically impossible.
What is a Browser Notification Scam? A browser notification scam consists of fake messages that look like real notifications from websites. These scams deceive users into clicking on links that could direct them to harmful websites, phishing schemes, or malware downloads. The notifications often imitate real alerts, such as system updates, subscription confirmations, or attractive offers, making them hard to spot initially.
What is a Browser Notification? Browser notifications are messages that websites send to your device, typically showing up as pop-ups or alerts in the corner of your screen. These notifications can offer helpful information, like social media updates, reminders, or news alerts. When you visit a site that requests permission to send notifications, you’ll usually see a prompt asking if you want to allow or block these messages. While legitimate notifications can enhance your online experience, scammers have found ways to exploit this feature for malicious purposes.
Need a hand resolving this? Contact Donline.
Hundreds of people have been made redundant and dozens of bars have closed after craft beer firm Brewdog went into administration.
US beverage and medical cannabis company Tilray has bought the company's UK brewing operations, brand and 11 pubs in a £33m deal.
Administrators said the sale had preserved 733 jobs - but that 484 jobs had been lost and 38 bars had closed after they were not included in the rescue deal.
Tilray, which already owns several US craft beer brands, described the deal as a significant opportunity for growth in the UK and international markets.
The two firms are still negotiating for a deal on Brewdog's assets in the United States and Australia.
A very sad day. We always have a selection of Brewdog beers in our fridge. I really feel for those folks whose jobs are lost or at risk. Also for all those peeps who invested in the company.
