ICT news

• Pentagon Threatens Anthropic Punishment

  16-02-2026 16:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is "close" to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a "supply chain risk" -- meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios.
  The senior official said: "It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this."
  That kind of penalty is usu
  
  Read more

• Sony May Push Next PlayStation To 2028 or 2029 as AI-fueled Memory Chip Shortage Upends Plans

  16-02-2026 15:06 via games.slashdot.org
  Sony is considering delaying the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029 as a global shortage of memory chips -- driven by the AI industry's rapidly growing appetite for the same DRAM that goes into gaming hardware, smartphones, and laptops -- squeezes supply and sends prices surging, Bloomberg News reported Monday.
  A delay of that magnitude would upend Sony's carefully orchestrated strategy to sustain user engagement between hardware generations. The shortage traces back to S
  
  Read more

• Where's The Evidence That AI Increases Productivity?

  16-02-2026 13:34 via it.slashdot.org
  IT productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson writes in the Financial Times that he's finally found evidence AI is impacting America's economy. This week America's Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 403,000 drop in 2025's payroll growth — while real GDP "remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter."
  This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth. My own updated analysis suggests a
  
  Read more

• 'I Tried Running Linux On an Apple Silicon Mac and Regretted It'

  16-02-2026 09:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  Installing Linux on a MacBook Air "turned out to be a very underwhelming experience," according to the tech news site MakeUseOf:
  The thing about Apple silicon Macs is that it's not as simple as downloading an AArch64 ISO of your favorite distro and installing it. Yes, the M-series chips are ARM-based, but that doesn't automatically make the whole system compatible in the same way most traditional x86 PCs are. Pretty much everything in modern MacBooks is custom. The boot process isn't standard UE
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Will Tech Giants Just Use AI Interactions to Create More Effective Ads?

  16-02-2026 06:34 via slashdot.org
  Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn't ask before making "Meta AI" an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
  "The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — raises an important question about what's in it for the internet companies..."
  Behind the scenes, the companies are laying the groundwork for a digita
  
  Read more

• Ars Technica's AI Reporter Apologizes For Mistakenly Publishing Fake AI-Generated Quotes

  16-02-2026 02:41 via news.slashdot.org
  Last week Scott Shambaugh learned an AI agent published a "hit piece" about him after he'd rejected the AI agent's pull request. (And that incident was covered by Ars Technica's senior AI reporter.)
  But then Shambaugh realized their article attributed quotes to him he hadn't said — that were presumably AI-generated.Sunday Ars Technica's founder/editor-in-chief apologized, admitting their article had indeed contained "fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool" that were then "attributed
  
  Read more

• Rivian's Stock Spikes 27% After Reporting $144 Million Profit in 2025

  16-02-2026 00:35 via tech.slashdot.org
  Rivian's stock skyrocketed 27% Friday after the electric car maker "shocked the market with strong earnings results," reports the Los Angeles Times, "proving itself an outlier in the EV market, which has been struggling with the end of government subsidies and cooling consumer excitement."
  They add that Rivian's strong earnings results suggest that "after years of struggling with losses, it may have at last found a path to profitability."
  On Thursday, Rivian reported gross profits for 2025 of $1
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!