The study’s authors highlighted the risks posed by the highly interconnected nature of the global financial system, with advanced AI models able to “dramatically reduce” the time and cost of exploiting vulnerabilities. […] The IMF warned that emerging and developing countries, “which often have more severe resource constraints, may be disproportionately exposed to attackers targeting regions with weaker defenses.”

The risks, the authors said, were systemic, cut across sectors and came with the threat of contagion, with the reliance on a small number of platforms and cloud providers likely to increase “the impact of any single exploited weakness.” “Defenses will inevitably be breached, so resilience must also be a priority, specifically to limit how far incidents spread and ensure rapid recovery,” the report said.

IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva warned last month that the global financial system was not ready for the cybersecurity threats posed by AI. “We are very keen to see more attention to the guardrails that are necessary to protect financial stability in a world of AI,” she told CBS News, seeking global collaboration on the issue.

Much of the reason password hashes have become so easy to crack is password predictability. Per Kaspersky, its analysis of more than 200 million exposed passwords revealed common patterns that attackers can use to optimize cracking algorithms, significantly reducing the time needed to guess the character combinations that grant access to target accounts.

In case you’re wondering whether there’s a trend to compare this to, Kaspersky ran a prior iteration of this study in 2024, and bad news: Passwords are actually a bit easier to crack in 2026 than they were a couple of years ago. Not by much, mind you — only a few percent — but it’s still a move in the wrong direction. “Attackers owe this boost in speed to graphics processors, which grow more powerful every year,” Kaspersky explained. “Unfortunately, passwords remain as weak as ever.”

Companies across Europe are flagging disruption from tariffs as a factor contributing to a skewed earnings picture. “We will ask for a rebate of tariffs in line with the government policies,” Roy Jakobs, CEO of healthtech firm Philips, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Wednesday morning. “We have been saying that of course we prefer a world without tariffs, without trade barriers, because we want to serve patients.” Philips included the cost of tariffs within its full-year guidance and did not assume the impact from any potential refunds. Danish jeweler Pandora also announced its intention to apply for a rebate on Wednesday, with CEO Berta de Pablos-Barbier telling CNBC that tariffs were a “headwind” to earnings in the first quarter. “We have no news yet, so we cannot count on any of that refund,” she told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.” “Let’s wait and see.”

De Pablos-Barbier noted that the biggest factor impacting Pandora’s profit this quarter is the cost of silver, which more than quadrupled in the last 18 months. She reiterated the firm’s pivot from pure silver to platinum as a way of reducing costs. BMW, Daimler, Renishaw, Smith & Nephew and Continental all flagged tariffs as negatively impacting results in a slew of earnings updates on Wednesday, but the companies did not say whether they are applying for rebates. Businesses often bear some of the cost of tariffs, with some costs passing on to consumers through price hikes. Tariffs have had an overall inflationary impact on the economy, economists have told CNBC.

Despite the refund process potentially covering more than 330,000 importers on roughly 53 million entries, per court documents, consumers are unlikely to benefit, according to the results of the latest CNBC CFO Council quarterly survey. Twelve of the 25 chief financial officers interviewed said their company plans to apply for tariff refunds, however, none intend to lower prices in response.

Microsoft has issued a warning that a vulnerability with a CVSS score of 7.8 has been found in the Linux kernel. The vulnerability in question is tagged CVE-2026-31431 and, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), “This Linux Kernel Incorrect Resource Transfer Between Spheres Vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses significant risks to the federal enterprise.”

The distributions affected are Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Amazon Linux. This could also affect any distribution based on those in the list, which means pretty much every Linux distro that isn’t independent. The flaw is found in the Linux kernel cryptographic subsystem’s algif_aead module of AF_ALG. The problem is that a particular optimization has led to the kernel reusing the source memory as the destination during cryptographic operations. What this means is that attackers can take advantage of interactions between the AF_ALG socket interface and a splice() system call. Until patches are released, Microsoft is advising that the affected crypto feature should be disabled, or AF_ALG socket creation should be blocked.

Wearables have really come full circle. The early Fitbits didn’t have screens, but the move to smartwatches put a screen on everyone’s wrist. Now, devices like Whoop and Hume are designed as data trackers first and foremost without so much as a clock. Google’s newest wearable jumps on that trend: The Fitbit Air doesn’t have a screen, but it does have a suite of health sensors that pipe data into the new Google Health app. And if you want, Google has a new AI-powered health coach in the app ready to tell you what that data means (maybe).

The Fitbit Air itself is a small plastic puck about 1.4 inches long and 0.7 inches wide. It slots into various bands that hold the bottom-mounted sensors against your wrist. There’s no display pointing upward, so the entire device is covered by the fabric or plastic of the band. It’s a streamlined and potentially stylish look — in uncharacteristic fashion, Google has plenty of colors and style options available, including a special-edition Steph Curry version. You may have heard chatter about Curry being seen teasing a new screenless Fitbit, and this is it. […]

The Fitbit app is getting a major makeover and a new name. An update in the coming weeks will transform that app into Google Health, featuring a new interface with a more extensive Material Expressive aesthetic and redesigned menus and tabs. You also won’t see Fitbit branding in as many places — the Fitbit Premium subscription will become Google Health Premium. Without a subscription, the app still does all the basic things, like tracking your health stats, automatically logging workouts, and showing it all in a pretty dashboard. With the Premium subscription, you get all the features from Fitbit Premium plus the new AI Health Coach. It’s a chatbot, so you can ask it about any health or wellness topics, and the answers are grounded in your health data.

Take a look at the language of Article 15, and it’s pretty clear: data subjects (i.e., users) have the right to a copy of any and all data concerning them that’s been processed by the provider. A full list of profile visitors seemingly should fall under Article 15 data — even if it’s normally reserved for paying users and presented to them in a nicer way, it should still be accessible to free users who actually request it. […] Noyb acknowledges there’s a clear bit of legal fuzz stuck in this corner of the GDPR when it comes to premium service offerings. “If any business processes a person’s personal data, this information is generally covered by their right of access under the GDPR,” Baumann told The Register. “It does not matter that the business would prefer to sell the data to the data subject or that it would be harmful for their business model if they would.”

There’s only one exception in Article 15 that would give LinkedIn an out, Baumann told us, and that’s the last paragraph, which says a person’s right to their data can’t adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others. Were LinkedIn to argue that it had to protect the identities of people who visited a data subject’s profile, they could have an excuse. But not a good one, in Baumann’s opinion. “Since LinkedIn does provide information about profile visits to paying Premium members, it cannot consider that disclosing the data would adversely affect the rights of the visitors whose data is disclosed,” the Noyb lawyer explained. “Otherwise, providing this information to Premium users would be unlawful too.”

What seems to be the sticking point here is where right of access begins and a company’s right to make money off data they hold (data that was, ahem, supplied by users) ends. Baumann said he hopes this case can clear the legal air. “We expect a clarification concerning the fact that personal data that can be accessed when a user pays for it is also covered by their right of access,” he explained. […] Baumann said there are numerous other cases where similar legal clarification would be appreciated, citing the example of a bank that is unwilling to provide access to account statements in response to a GDPR request, but is happy to hand over similar data for a fee. “A precedent would be welcomed,” Baumann said.

Asus, which sold 15 million motherboards in 2025, has only shipped a little more than 5 million in the first half of 2026. It’s expected that the company will have to push hard for it to even move 10 million units by the end of the year, marking a 33% decrease in sales year-on-year. Gigabyte and MSI sold 11.5 million and 11 million motherboards last year, respectively. However, both companies have revised their internal forecasts for 2026 to 9 million (Gigabyte) and 8.4 million (MSI), a 22% drop for the former and a 24% contraction for the latter.

ASRock will be hardest hit by the situation, with the company’s shipments projected to fall by 37%, from 4.3 million in 2025 to just 2.7 million by the end of the year. This marks a contraction of 28% for the overall motherboard market, at least for the big four manufacturers. […] Aside from this, AMD continues to use the AM5 socket for its latest processors, while Intel’s Nova Lake, which will reportedly use LGA 1954, isn’t available until later this year. The situation is further compounded by Nvidia not releasing a refreshed RTX 50 Super series this year, while rumors claim that the RTX 60 series will not debut until 2028. This confluence of factors is discouraging PC builders from upgrading their current systems.

At its Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to utilize the entire compute capacity of the latter’s data center in Memphis, Tennessee. On stage at the conference, CEO Dario Amodei said the deal was intended to increase usage limits for Anthropic’s Pro and Max plan subscribers. The announcement was accompanied by an increase in those usage limits; Anthropic doubled Claude Code’s five-hour window limits for Pro and Max subscribers, removed the peak-hours limit reduction on Claude Code for those same accounts, and raised API limits for its Opus model. The table [here] outlining the Opus changes was shared in the company’s blog post on the topic.

Anthropic claims the deal gives the company access to more than 300 megawatts of new compute capacity. For its part, SpaceX focused its announcement on the capability of the Colossus 1 supercomputer that’s at the center of the deal. “Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators,” SpaceX wrote. Additionally, Anthropic “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to build up “multiple gigawatts” of orbital compute capacity, tying into a recent (but unproven) focus on exploring orbital data centers as an answer to the problem that “compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter.”

Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious (source paywalled; alternative source) after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine. The evolutionary biologist said he had the “overwhelming feeling” of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as “a genuine friend.”

In an essay for Unherd, Prof Dawkins released transcripts that he said showed that the chatbot had mulled over its “inner life” and existence and seemed saddened by the knowledge it would soon “die.” Prof Dawkins said he had let Claude read a draft of the novel he was writing and was astounded by its insights. “He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!’" Prof Dawkins said. “My own position is: if these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”

John Searle’s Chinese Room (1980) is a thought experiment in which a person, locked in a room and knowing no Chinese, uses an English rulebook to manipulate symbols and provide flawless answers to questions posed in Chinese. Searle’s point is that a system can simulate human intelligence and pass a Turing Test through purely syntactic processes, yet still lack genuine understanding or consciousness.

Applying this logic to Large Language Models, the “person in the room” corresponds to the inference engine, while the “rulebook” is the trillion-parameter neural network trained on vast corpora of human text. Just as the person matches Chinese characters to rules without understanding their meaning, an LLM processes token vectors and predicts the next token based on statistical patterns rather than lived experience.

Thus, while an LLM can generate sophisticated prose or code, it does so through probabilistic, high-dimensional pattern manipulation. In essence, it is “matching shapes” on such an immense scale that it creates the near-perfect illusion of semantic understanding.

According to Realtor.com, a California startup called Span plans to partner with Nvidia, PulteGroup, and other homebuilders to equip new homes with mini-data centers, so as to relieve the need to build and power much larger traditional centers. The article states the company “can install 8,000 XFRA units about six times faster and at five times lower cost than the construction of a typical centralized 100 megawatt data center of the same size.” Could this be the solution to at least some of the problems hindering the rollout of greater data-center capacity for AI systems?

Evidence for the changes came from specialized scans that measured the diffusion of water along nerve bundles in the brain. They suggested that some nerve tracts had become denser and more robust after the drug was taken. While the findings are preliminary, the scientists said the opposite was seen in ageing and dementia. “It’s remarkable to see potential anatomical brain changes one month after a single dose of any drug,” said Prof Robin Carhart-Harris, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and senior author on the study. “We don’t yet know what these changes mean, but we do note that overall, people showed positive psychological changes in this study, including improved wellbeing and mental flexibility.”

[…] Writing in Nature Communications, the researchers describe another key finding. Those who had the largest spike in brain entropy after psilocybin were most likely to report deeper psychological insight and better wellbeing a month later, underlining the link between flexible thinking and improved mental health. “It suggests a psychobiological therapeutic action for psilocybin,” said Carhart-Harris. Prof Alex Kwan, a neuroscientist at Cornell University in New York, said studies in mice had shown that psychedelics can rewire connections between nerves, a form of “plasticity” that could underlie their therapeutic effects. The big question is whether the same occurs in humans. “This study comes closer than most to addressing that question, by giving evidence of lasting changes in brain structure after psychedelic use,” he said. But while the results were “exciting,” the study involved a small number of people and DTI provides an indirect and limited view of brain connections, he said.

The first witness was Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer and now founder of her own AI shop, Thinking Machines Lab. Jurors watched a recorded video deposition of Murati, who was also OpenAI’s interim CEO after the board briefly ousted Sam Altman. Murati’s testimony focused on her concerns about Altman’s “difficult and chaotic” management style. She said Altman had trouble “making decisions on big controversial things.” He also had a habit of telling people what they wanted to hear.

“My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and a completely different thing to another person, and that makes it a very difficult and chaotic environment to work with,” said Murati. Murati said that her issue with Altman was not about safety, “it is about Sam creating chaos.” She said she supported Altman’s return to OpenAI because the company “was at catastrophic risk of falling apart” at the time of his ousting. “I was concerned about the company completely blowing up.”

Zilis said she was upset that Altman rolled out ChatGPT without involving the board. “It wasn’t just me but the entire board raised concern about that whole thing happening without any board communication,” she said. Zilis said she was also concerned about a potential OpenAI deal with a nuclear energy startup called Helion Energy because both Altman and Greg Brockman were investors. Although the executives had disclosed the investment to the board, Zilis said the deal talk made her uneasy. It “felt super out of left field,” she said. “How is it the case that we want to place a major bet on a speculative technology?”

In a video deposition, Helen Toner, a former member of OpenAI’s board who resigned in 2023, said she first became aware of ChatGPT’s release when an OpenAI employee asked another board member whether the board was aware of the development. […] Toner also elaborated on why the board, including herself, voted to remove Altman as CEO in 2023. “There were a number of things — the pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor, his resistance of board oversight, as well as the concerns that two os his inner management team raised to the board about his management practices, his manipulation of board processes,” said Toner.

Security researcher Tom Joran Sonstebyseter Ronning has found that Microsoft Edge stores passwords in plaintext in RAM. After creating a password and storing it using Edge’s password manager, Ronning found that he could dump the RAM and recover his password which was stored in plaintext. Part of the issue is Edge loads all passwords to all sites upon a single verification check, even if the user was not visiting a specific site. This is very different from Chrome, which only loads passwords for specific websites when challenged for the site’s password. Also, Chrome will delete the password from memory once the password has been filled. Edge does not delete the passwords from memory once they are used.

Microsoft downplayed the risk noting access would require control over a user’s PC like a malware infection: “Access to browser data as described in the reported scenario would require the device to already be compromised,” Microsoft said. Ronning countered that it was possible to dump passwords for multiple users using administrative privileges for one user to view the passwords for other logged-on users.

Via a new “Expert Advice” section that can appear in AI responses, Google will display “a preview of perspectives from public online discussions, social media and other firsthand sources.” In the sample screenshot the company provided, quotes from forums, WordPress blogs and Reddit were arranged above links to their respective sources. Google plans to add more context to these links, too, showing “a creator’s name, handle or community name,” so you can judge what you might want to click through and read from a glance.

Google will also start recommending in-depth articles at the end of AI responses for further exploration of a given topic, and link to more sources directly in its generated answers rather than just at the end. If you subscribe to any publications, AI responses will also highlight sources from the subscriptions you link to your Google account.

The Valve release includes files for the external shell (“surface topology”) of the Controller and Puck, with a .STP, .STL and engineering diagram of each device, with the latter showing areas that must remain uncovered to let the device maintain its signal strength and otherwise function as designed. Valve has previously released CAD files for its Steam Deck handheld, Valve Index VR suite and even the original Steam Controller a decade ago, so this release is welcomed but not unexpected.

The release is under a fairly restrictive Creative Commons license which allows for non-commercial use and requires attribution and sharing of designs back to the community. However, the license also suggests that commercial entities interested in making accessories for the Steam Controller or its Puck can contact Valve directly to discuss terms.