The Washington Post reports on 996, "a term popularized in China that refers to a rigid work schedule in which people work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week..." As the artificial intelligence race heats up, many start-ups in Silicon Valley and New York are promoting hardcore culture as a way of life, pushing the limits of work hours, demanding that workers move fast to be first in the market. Some are even promoting 996 as a virtue in the hiring process and keeping "grind scores" of companies... Whoever builds first in AI will capture the market, and the window of opportunity is two to three years, "so you better run faster than everyone else," said Inaki Berenguer, managing partner of venture-capital firm LifeX Ventures.

At San Francisco-based AI start-up Sonatic, the grind culture also allows for meal, gym and pickleball time, said Kinjal Nandy, its CEO. Nandy recently posted a job opening on X that requires in-person work seven days a week. He said working 10-hour days sounds like a lot but the company also offers its first hires perks such as free housing in a hacker house, food delivery credits and a free subscription to the dating service Raya... Mercor, a San Francisco-based start-up that uses AI to match people to jobs, recently posted an opening for a customer success engineer, saying that candidates should have a willingness to work six days a week, and it's not negotiable. "We know this isn't for everyone, so we want to put it up top," the listing reads.

Being in-person rather than remote is a requirement at some start-ups. AI start-up StarSling had two engineering job descriptions that required six days a week of in-person work. In a job description for an engineer, Rilla, an AI company in New York, said candidates should not work at the company if they're not excited about working about 70 hours a week in person. One venture capitalist even started tracking "grind scores." Jared Sleeper, a partner at New York-based venture capital firm Avenir, recently ranked public software companies' "grind score" in a post on X, which went viral. Using data from Glassdoor, it ranks the percentage of employees who have a positive outlook for the company compared with their views on work-life balance.
"At Google's AI division, cofounder Sergey Brin views 60 hours per week as the 'sweet spot' for productivity," notes the Independent: Working more than 55 hours a week, compared with a standard 35-40-hour week, is linked to a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of death from heart disease, according to the World Health Organization. Productivity also suffers. A British study shows that working beyond 60 hours a week can reduce overall output, slow cognitive performance, and impair tasks ranging from call handling to problem-solving.

Shorter workweeks, in contrast, appear to boost productivity. Microsoft Japan saw a roughly 40% increase in output after adopting a four-day work week. In a UK trial, 61 companies that tested a four-day schedule reported revenue gains, with 92 percent choosing to keep the policy, according to Bloomberg.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Guide: Microsoft Teams is about to deal a heavy blow to those who like to work from home for peace and quiet. In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker's location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you're actually there or not. From a boss' perspective, this would eliminate any of that confusion as to where your team actually is. But for those people who have found their own sanctuary of peaceful productivity by working from home, consider this a warning that Teams is about to tattle on you. According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap: "When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in." The location of that worker will apparently update automatically upon connecting.

It's set to launch on Windows and macOS, with rollout starting at the end of this year. "This feature will be off by default," notes Microsoft. But "tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."

Hackers have been spreading malware through more than 3,000 YouTube videos advertising cracked software and game hacks, cybersecurity firm Check Point warned this week. The campaign, active since at least 2021, tripled its video production in 2025. The videos promoted free versions of Adobe Photoshop, FL Studio, Microsoft Office, and game cheats for titles like Roblox. Fake comments created the appearance of legitimacy, the researchers found.

Users who downloaded archives from Dropbox, Google Drive, or MediaFire were instructed to disable Windows Defender before opening files. The downloads contained malware including Lumma and Rhadamanthys, which steal passwords and cryptocurrency wallet information. The hackers hijacked existing accounts and created new ones. One compromised channel with 129,000 subscribers posted a cracked Photoshop video that reached 291,000 views. Another video for FL Studio received over 147,000 views.

Microsoft has reorganized its Outlook team under new leadership as part of a broader effort to integrate AI into its core products. Gaurav Sareen, a corporate vice president at the company, recently assumed direct leadership of the Outlook division after Lynn Ayres, who previously ran the team, began a sabbatical. The move represents the latest in a series of AI-focused restructurings across Microsoft's divisions. Sareen wrote in an internal memo that the company now has an opportunity to reimagine Outlook from the ground up rather than add AI features to existing systems, according to The Verge.

Ryan Roslansky, the chief executive of LinkedIn, took on an expanded role earlier this year as head of Office. Sareen now reports to Roslansky, who oversees the Office suite, Outlook and Microsoft 365 Copilot teams. The restructuring comes after Microsoft spent several years developing One Outlook, a web-based version meant to replace separate Windows, Mac, and web applications.

Samsung and SK Hynix have raised DRAM and NAND flash prices by up to 30% for the fourth quarter, Korean publications report. The two Korean memory giants passed the new rates on to customers as analysts predict the AI-driven memory supercycle will be longer and stronger than past boom periods.

Several leading international electronics and server companies are stockpiling memory and negotiating long-term supply deals spanning two to three years. U.S. and Chinese electronics firms and data center operators are exploring mid-to-long-term contracts. Companies typically sign DRAM contracts on a quarterly or annual basis.

An anonymous reader writes: Gboard has introduced some significant changes to the app over the past few weeks, making typing on the app much easier than ever before. You can now resize the keyboard to your desired size, and there's even something in the works that will make adding apostrophes to your text even more seamless.

If all of that wasn't enough, the app is now introducing a feature that some will find peculiar, which will allow users to remove the period and common punctuation keys from Gboard. This news comes to us from 9to5Google, sharing that this is now an option with the latest version of the app.

Fujitsu has released a new laptop in Japan with a built-in Blu-ray drive. The FMV Note A A77-K3 includes a BDXL-compatible optical drive that can read and burn discs. Most laptop manufacturers globally stopped including optical drives in the second half of the 2010s. The Japanese market has refused to follow that trend.

Shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district recently experienced a spike in demand for optical drives and systems capable of reading Blu-ray discs, Tom's Hardware reports. Fujitsu sells two additional models in the FMV Note A line using Intel thirteenth-generation chips. Those systems include DVD drives instead of Blu-ray capability. Some other Japanese manufacturers also released optical-drive-equipped laptops earlier in 2025.

OpenBSD 7.8 has been released, adding Raspberry Pi 5 support, enhanced AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV-ES) capabilities, and expanded hardware compatibility including new Qualcomm, Rockchip, and Apple ARM drivers. Phoronix reports: OpenBSD 7.8 also brings multiple improvements around enabling AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (AMD SEV) support with support for the PSP ioctl for encrypting and measuring state for SEV-ES, a new VMD option to run guests in SEV-ES mode, and other enablement work pertaining to that AMD SEV work in SEV-ES form at this point as a precursor to SEV-SNP. AMD SEV-ES should be working to start confidential virtual machines (VMs) when using the VMM/VMD hypervisor and the OpenBSD guests with KVM/QEMU.

OpenBSD 7.8 also improves compatibility of the FUSE file-system support with the Linux implementation, suspend/hibernate improvements, SMP improvements, updating to the Linux 6.12.50 DRM graphics drivers, several new Rockchip drivers, Raspberry Pi RP1 drivers, H.264 video support for the uvideo driver, and many network driver improvements. The changelog and download page can be found via OpenBSD.org.

Early Monday, an Amazon Web Services outage disrupted banks, games, and Peloton classes. Eight Sleep customers faced a different problem. Their internet-enabled mattresses malfunctioned. People woke to beds locked in upright positions, excessive heat, flashing lights, and unexpected alarms. Matteo Franceschetti, the company's chief executive, apologized and said engineers were building an outage-proof mode. By Monday evening, all devices functioned again, though some experienced data processing delays. The mattresses adjust temperature between 55 and 110 degrees and elevate bodies into different positions. They activate soundscapes and vibrational alarms. The advanced models cost over $5,000. A yearly subscription of $199 to $399 is required for temperature controls.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A lot of critical financial and government infrastructure runs on Cobol. The more-than-60-year-old mainframe coding language is embedded into payments and transaction rails, even though there are very few Cobol-literate coders available to maintain them. The big argument in favor of sticking with Cobol systems is that they work. The catch is that, whenever they stop working, it is difficult to figure out why. That's not good in a crisis, which is exactly when they're most likely to break. Covid-19 put a lot of strain the US state benefit systems.

The ones that used Cobol for processing unemployment claims failed spectacularly, according to a new working paper from The Atlanta Fed: "States that used an antiquated [unemployment insurance]-benefit system experienced a 2.8 percentage point decline in total credit and debit card consumption relative to card consumption in states with more modern UI benefit systems. [...] Using this estimate in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I find that the lack of investment in updating UI-benefit systems in COBOL states was associated with a reduction in real GDP of at least $40 billion (in 2019 dollars) lower during this [March 13 2020 to year-end] period

The paper uses Cobol as a proxy for old and inefficient IT, not the direct cause of failure. Claimants faced much longer delays in the 28 states that still used Cobol in 2020, both because of the unprecedented volume of claims and the difficulty updating systems with new eligibility rules, author Michael Navarrete finds. [...] As an aside, one oddity of the data is that Republican-controlled states were more likely to have replaced old IT systems, even though their standard unemployment insurance payments are lower on average. Why? Absolutely no idea, but here are the maps. And, once adjusted for state politics, here's the key finding.

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: A new malicious campaign is targeting macOS developers with fake Homebrew, LogMeIn, and TradingView platforms that deliver infostealing malware like AMOS (Atomic macOS Stealer) and Odyssey. The campaign employs "ClickFix" techniques where targets are tricked into executing commands in Terminal, infecting themselves with malware. Researchers at threat hunting company Hunt.io identified more than 85 domains impersonating the three platforms in this campaign [...].

When checking some of the domains, BleepingComputer discovered that in some cases the traffic to the sites was driven via Google Ads, indicating that the threat actor promoted them to appear in Google Search results. The malicious sites feature convincing download portals for the fake apps and instruct users to copy a curl command in their Terminal to install them, the researchers say. In other cases, like for TradingView, the malicious commands are presented as a "connection security confirmation step." However, if the user clicks on the 'copy' button, a base64-encoded installation command is delivered to the clipboard instead of the displayed Cloudflare verification ID.

OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas on Tuesday, an AI-powered web browser that CEO Sam Altman described as "smooth" and "quick" during a livestream announcement. The browser is available globally on macOS while versions for Windows, iOS, and Android are expected soon. Atlas includes memory features that personalize the browsing experience and an agent mode that allows ChatGPT to perform tasks such as booking reservations and flights or editing documents.

Users can manage these stored memories through the browser's settings and can open incognito windows. The browser displays a split-screen view by default when users click links from search results. The view shows both the webpage and the ChatGPT transcript simultaneously. Atlas also offers webpage summarization and a feature called "cursor chat" that allows users to select text and have ChatGPT revise it inline.

Foreign hackers breached the National Nuclear Security Administration's Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC) by exploiting unpatched Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities. The intrusion happened in August and is possibly linked to either Chinese state actors or Russian cybercriminals. CSO Online notes that "roughly 80% of the non-nuclear parts in the nation's nuclear stockpile originate from KCNSC," making it "one of the most sensitive facilities in the federal weapons complex." From the report: The breach targeted a plant that produces the vast majority of critical non-nuclear components for US nuclear weapons under the NNSA, a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy (DOE) that oversees the design, production, and maintenance of the nation's nuclear weapons. Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies (FM&T) manages the Kansas City campus under contract to the NNSA. [...] The attackers exploited two recently disclosed Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities -- CVE-2025-53770, a spoofing flaw, and CVE-2025-49704, a remote code execution (RCE) bug -- both affecting on-premises servers. Microsoft issued fixes for the vulnerabilities on July 19.

On July 22, the NNSA confirmed it was one of the organizations hit by attacks enabled by the SharePoint flaws. "On Friday, July 18th, the exploitation of a Microsoft SharePoint zero-day vulnerability began affecting the Department of Energy," a DOE spokesperson said. However, the DOE contended at the time, "The department was minimally impacted due to its widespread use of the Microsoft M365 cloud and very capable cybersecurity systems. A very small number of systems were impacted. All impacted systems are being restored." By early August, federal responders, including personnel from the NSA, were on-site at the Kansas City facility, the source tells CSO.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employees, a member of the group told 404 Media. The member said the group did this by digging through its caches of stolen Salesforce customer data. The person provided 404 Media with samples of this information, which 404 Media was able to corroborate.

As well as NSA officials, the person sent 404 Media personal data on officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), members of the Air Force, and several other agencies.

A Court of Accounts report written before Sunday's theft of crown jewels from the Louvre revealed the museum's security systems were outdated and inadequate [non-paywalled source]. The report noted a lack of basic CCTV equipment across multiple wings. Cameras had mainly been installed only when rooms were refurbished due to repeated postponements of scheduled modernization. In the Denon wing where the Apollo Gallery was targeted, a third of rooms had no CCTV cameras. Three-quarters of rooms in the Richelieu wing and nearly two-thirds in the Sully wing lacked cameras.

The thieves were caught on camera at one point but were masked and impossible to identify, according to Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau. The alarm system activated when thieves cut open display cases, but they threatened staff who left the area. Culture minister Rachida Dati confirmed new CCTV cameras would be installed. President Macron had earmarked $186.30 million to upgrade the Louvre's security systems under a renaissance plan launched in June.

AWS experienced a three-hour outage early Monday morning that disrupted thousands of websites and applications across the globe. The cloud computing provider reported DNS problems with DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia starting at 12:11 a.m. Pacific time. Over 4 million users reported issues, according to Downdetector. Snapchat saw reports spike from more than 22,000 to around 4,000 as systems recovered. Roblox dropped from over 12,600 complaints to fewer than 500. Reddit and the financial platform Chime remained affected longer. Perplexity, Coinbase and Robinhood attributed their platform disruptions directly to AWS.

Gaming platforms including Fortnite, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans went offline. Signal confirmed the messaging app was down. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the HMRC website faced problems. United Airlines reported disrupted access to its app and website overnight. Some internal systems were temporarily affected. Delta experienced a small number of minor flight delays. By 3:35 a.m. Pacific time, AWS said the issue had been fully mitigated. Most service operations were succeeding normally though some requests faced throttling during final resolution. AWS holds roughly one-third of the cloud infrastructure market ahead of Microsoft and Google.

"Windows Recovery Environment (RE), as the name suggests, is a built-in set of tools inside Windows that allow you to troubleshoot your computer, including booting into the BIOS, or starting the computer in safe mode," writes Tom's Hardware.

"It's a crucial piece of software that has now, unfortunately, been rendered useless (for many) as part of the latest Windows update." A new bug discovered in Windows 11's October build, KB5066835, makes it so that your USB keyboard and mouse stop working entirely, so you cannot interact with the recovery UI at all.

This problem has already been recognized and highlighted by Microsoft, who clarified that a fix is on its way to address this issue. Any plugged-in peripherals will continue to work just fine inside the actual operating system, but as soon as you go into Windows RE, your USB keyboard and mouse will become unresponsive. It's important to note that if your PC fails to start-up for any reason, it defaults to the recovery environment to, you know, recover and diagnose any issues that might've been preventing it from booting normally.

Note that those hanging onto old PS/2-connector equipped keyboards and mice seem to be unaffected by this latest Windows software gaffe.

On Cloudflare's blog, a senior research engineer shares a plan for "improving the trustworthiness of JavaScript on the web."

"It is as true today as it was in 2011 that Javascript cryptography is Considered Harmful." The main problem is code distribution. Consider an end-to-end-encrypted messaging web application. The application generates cryptographic keys in the client's browser that lets users view and send end-to-end encrypted messages to each other. If the application is compromised, what would stop the malicious actor from simply modifying their Javascript to exfiltrate messages? It is interesting to note that smartphone apps don't have this issue. This is because app stores do a lot of heavy lifting to provide security for the app ecosystem. Specifically, they provide integrity, ensuring that apps being delivered are not tampered with, consistency, ensuring all users get the same app, and transparency, ensuring that the record of versions of an app is truthful and publicly visible.

It would be nice if we could get these properties for our end-to-end encrypted web application, and the web as a whole, without requiring a single central authority like an app store. Further, such a system would benefit all in-browser uses of cryptography, not just end-to-end-encrypted apps. For example, many web-based confidential LLMs, cryptocurrency wallets, and voting systems use in-browser Javascript cryptography for the last step of their verification chains. In this post, we will provide an early look at such a system, called Web Application Integrity, Consistency, and Transparency (WAICT) that we have helped author. WAICT is a W3C-backed effort among browser vendors, cloud providers, and encrypted communication developers to bring stronger security guarantees to the entire web... We hope to build even wider consensus on the solution design in the near future....

We would like to have a way of enforcing integrity on an entire site, i.e., every asset under a domain. For this, WAICT defines an integrity manifest, a configuration file that websites can provide to clients. One important item in the manifest is the asset hashes dictionary, mapping a hash belonging to an asset that the browser might load from that domain, to the path of that asset.
The blog post points out that the WEBCAT protocol (created by the Freedom of Press Foundation) "allows site owners to announce the identities of the developers that have signed the site's integrity manifest, i.e., have signed all the code and other assets that the site is serving to the user... We've made WAICT extensible enough to fit WEBCAT inside and benefit from the transparency components." The proposal also envisions a service storing metadata for transparency-enabled sites on the web (along with "witnesses" who verify the prefix tree holding the hashes for domain manifests).

"We are still very early in the standardization process," with hopes to soon "begin standardizing the integrity manifest format. And then after that we can start standardizing all the other features. We intend to work on this specification hand-in-hand with browsers and the IETF, and we hope to have some exciting betas soon. In the meantime, you can follow along with our transparency specification draft,/A>, check out the open problems, and share your ideas."

"My boss thinks AI will solve every problem and is wildly enthusiastic about it," complains a mid-level worker at a Fortune 500 company, who considers the technology "unproven and wildly erratic."

So how should they navigate the next 10 years until retirement, they ask the Washington Post's "Work Advice" columnist. The columnist first notes that "Despite promises that AI will eliminate tedious, 'low-value' tasks from our workload, many consumers and companies seem to be using it primarily as a cheap shortcut to avoid hiring professional actors, writers or artists — whose work, in some cases, was stolen to train the tools usurping them..." Kevin Cantera, a reader from Las Cruces, New Mexico [a writer for an education-tech compay], willingly embraced AI for work. But as it turns out, he was training his replacement... Even without the "AI will take our jobs" specter, there's much to be wary of in the AI hype. Faster isn't always better. Parroting and predicting linguistic patterns isn't the same as creativity and innovation... There are concerns about hallucinations, faulty data models, and intentional misuse for purposes of deception. And that's not even addressing the environmental impact of all the power- and water-hogging data centers needed to support this innovation.

And yet, it seems, resistance may be futile. The AI genie is out of the bottle and granting wishes. And at the rate it's evolving, you won't have 10 years to weigh the merits and get comfortable with it. Even if you move on to another workplace, odds are AI will show up there before long. Speaking as one grumpy old Luddite to another, it might be time to get a little curious about this technology just so you can separate helpfulness from hype.

It might help to think of AI as just another software tool that you have to get familiar with to do your job. Learn what it's good for — and what it's bad at — so you can recommend guidelines for ethical and beneficial use. Learn how to word your wishes to get accurate results. Become the "human in the loop" managing the virtual intern. You can test the bathwater without drinking it. Focus on the little ways AI can accommodate and support you and your colleagues. Maybe it could handle small tasks in your workflow that you wish you could hand off to an assistant. Automated transcriptions and meeting notes could be a life-changer for a colleague with auditory processing issues.

I can't guarantee that dabbling in AI will protect your job. But refusing to engage definitely won't help. And if you decide it's time to change jobs, having some extra AI knowledge and experience under your belt will make you a more attractive candidate, even if you never end up having to use it.

Cory Doctorow has always warned that companies "enshittify" their services — shifting "as much as they can from users, workers, suppliers, and business customers to themselves." But this week Doctorow writes in Communications of the ACM that enshittification "would be much, much worse if not for tech workers," who have "the power to tell their bosses to go to hell..." When your skills are in such high demand that you can quit your job, walk across the street, and get a better one later that same day, your boss has a real incentive to make you feel like you are their social equal, empowered to say and do whatever feels technically right... The per-worker revenue for successful tech companies is unfathomable — tens or even hundreds of times their wages and stock compensation packages.
"No wonder tech bosses are so excited about AI coding tools," Doctorow adds, "which promise to turn skilled programmers from creative problem-solvers to mere code reviewers for AI as it produces tech debt at scale. Code reviewers never tell their bosses to go to hell, and they are a lot easier to replace."

So how should tech workers respond in a world where tech workers are now "as disposable as Amazon warehouse workers and drivers...?" Throughout the entire history of human civilization, there has only ever been one way to guarantee fair wages and decent conditions for workers: unions. Even non-union workers benefit from unions, because strong unions are the force that causes labor protection laws to be passed, which protect all workers. Tech workers have historically been monumentally uninterested in unionization, and it's not hard to see why. Why go to all those meetings and pay those dues when you could tell your boss to go to hell on Tuesday and have a new job by Wednesday? That's not the case anymore. It will likely never be the case again.

Interest in tech unions is at an all-time high. Groups such as Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition are doing a land-office business, and copies of Ethan Marcotte's You Deserve a Tech Union are flying off the shelves. Now is the time to get organized. Your boss has made it clear how you'd be treated if they had their way. They're about to get it.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.