Loryn Brantz created The Good Advice Cupcake for BuzzFeed years ago. The company licensed the character for a new Amazon series—made with AI—without her consent.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: Microsoft faces backlash after a blog post implied criminal referral and legal action against security researcher Nightmare Eclipse over public bug disclosures  —  After a security researcher published a series of unpatched bugs in Microsoft products, along with code to exploit them …

AI adoption seems to be on the rise, but the maturity of the technology means enterprises are still facing many obstacles.

As part of Dark Reading's 20th anniversary package, we asked readers for a cybersecurity-related caption that captures their thoughts about the industry's last two decades.

Soon-to-be-laid-off Meta contractors say they’re being treated differently than Mark Zuckerberg’s full-time employees, who stand to receive more generous severance packages.

CJ Haddad / CNBC: Dell stock closed up 32.81%, its best day ever, after reporting its fastest pace of revenue growth for any period since returning to the public market in 2018  —  Shares of Dell Technologies closed 32.76% higher on Friday, wrapping its best day ever after the company reported its fastest pace …

Reece Rogers / Wired: Hands-on with Gemini Spark beta rolling out to AI Ultra subs: planned a birthday party from emails and calendar, but called a live-in boyfriend a “close friend”  —  Google's new AI agent combed through my emails, documents, and calendar to plan a birthday party and still didn't clock the person most important to me.

"Backrooms" is the theatrical debut for 20-year-old director Kane Parsons. A24 YouTube is the world's biggest video site. So it makes sense that young directors would distribute their movies there, and find big audiences. Now Hollywood has realized those same directors could make "real" movies, and get big audiences, too. Hollywood has been struggling to compete with YouTube for years. Now it's trying a new strategy: hiring YouTubers. The early results look promising. This weekend, "Backrooms," a moody horror movie based on an internet meme, looks like it could bring in astonishing $60 million at the box office — which means it will likely beat out Disney's new "Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu." Director Kane Parsons has made stuff on YouTube for years, but this is his first film for theaters, which makes sense: He is 20 years old. That follows the success of "Obsession," which has grossed $74 million in the last two weeks. It's made by 26-year-old Curry Barker, another YouTube veteran making his theatrical debut. And those films came after Mark Fischbach, better known to his 38 million YouTube fans as Markiplier, brought out his "Iron Lung" movie, which he made for a reported $3 million and has now grossed $50 million. Journalism Rules require me to point out that three things make up a bona fide trend. But I think we're actually talking about two different ideas here. When Fischbach made his movie, he self-financed and produced the whole thing, and asked his fans for help with distribution as well. Going to see "Iron Lung" was something you did because you liked Markiplier and wanted to support him. Parsons and Barker also benefit from YouTube fandom. But their followings there are smaller than Fischbach's. More important: They are actively working within the Hollywood system, by making movies with established studios — A24 for "Backrooms," Blumhouse for "Obsession." That looks a lot more like Hollywood using YouTube as a farm team, where it can pluck promising online prospects and give them a shot at the big leagues. Which isn't a new idea. Mainstream media has been using the internet broadly and YouTube specifically as an incubator for years, which is why you know who Justin Bieber and Issa Rae are. It's true for directors, too: Dan Trachtenberg, who made last year's "Predator: Badlands," announced himself to Hollywood back in 2011, with a 7-minute short based on the video game Portal. It seems quite likely we will see a lot more of the "Backrooms" and "Obsession" model, simply because "making movies and putting them on YouTube" is such an obvious route for any young filmmaker. Martin Scorsese would have done the same thing, if he started out with an iPhone and a broadband connection. To me, the more intriguing question is whether we will see more Markipliers: people who develop real followings on YouTube (or any other digital platform) who can convince their followers to look up from their phones and buy tickets to something. That remains rare, but less than it used to be, which is why it's no longer shocking when podcasters (podcasters!) fill up theaters. Let's see if more directors go the "Iron Lung" route. Read the original article on Business Insider

Sana Pashankar / Bloomberg: US Space Force says SpaceX won a $4.16B contract to build a space-based tracking network as part of President Trump's Golden Dome defensive shield  —  SpaceX has won a contract for more than $4 billion to build satellites to track foreign aircraft and missiles as part of President Donald Trump's Golden Dome defensive shield.

Venture funding has always been a world of haves and have nots. And these days, the haves are having more than ever. Case in point this week was generative AI giant Anthropic's $65 billion Series H funding, followed by a billion-dollar funding for an AI software developer.

Enterprise Document Intelligence [Vol. 1 #1] The smallest version of RAG that actually works, on a real PDF, with grounded answers and the source lines highlighted. The post Baseline Enterprise RAG, From PDF to Highlighted Answer appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Google’s new AI agent combed through my emails, documents, and calendar to plan a birthday party and still didn’t clock the person most important to me.

The botnet was reportedly tied to a Russia-based residential proxy network.

A Micron sign travels across snow Bloomberg/Getty Images A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here. Micron crossed $1 trillion in market value this week, a milestone that would have sounded absurd to most investors even a few years ago. The memory-chip business has long been one of the cruelest corners of tech: brutal booms followed by catastrophic busts. I've covered this story before. Back in 2017, I wrote about Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy arguing that the DRAM market had finally changed for good. His thesis was that fewer suppliers and rising demand from cloud computing and AI would reduce the industry's historic tendency to destroy itself through overproduction. That argument turned out to be early, not wrong. Micron shares have soared roughly twentyfold since then. Samsung crossed the $1 trillion market-cap threshold earlier this month, and SK Hynix joined the party on Tuesday. There are fundamentals behind these moves: Samsung made more than $30 billion in profit during the first quarter alone. Now investors are asking the most dangerous question in finance: Is this time different? Maybe. The first big change is consolidation. In the early 1990s, there were more than 20 meaningful DRAM makers globally. Today, the industry is effectively controlled by three companies: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. For decades, memory makers responded to rising demand by flooding the market with new supply. Prices eventually collapsed and profits evaporated. Fewer competitors may mean fewer incentives to repeat that cycle. The second change is AI demand itself. Modern AI systems are ravenous consumers of memory because they constantly move and process huge amounts of data inside giant data centers. Even advanced techniques designed to reduce computing bottlenecks still run into memory constraints. Startup Lightmatter is using photonics — essentially light instead of copper — to speed up AI data centers, but CEO Nick Harris told me recently that this does nothing to eliminate the memory bottleneck. So, rampant AI demand is colliding with constrained supply. UBS analysts noted this week that memory makers are signing multi-year agreements with cloud giants that lock in both volume commitments and partially fixed pricing. That should add another layer of stability. UBS estimates these deals could keep the DRAM market undersupplied into 2028. Of course, this could still prove to be an unusually large up-cycle that eventually ends. The remaining players could flood the market again. New entrants could emerge. AI demand could cool, or a new technology might reduce the need for memory. But investors clearly believe the old memory business may finally be becoming something new. Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com. Read the original article on Business Insider

PCMag: What to expect at Computex 2026: AI chips, budget PCs competing with the MacBook Neo, Nvidia entering laptop SoC market with the rumored N1X chip, and more  —  The theme for Computex 2026, according to organizer TAITRA, is “AI Together.”  Sure, it sounds a little like a tech-industry group hug.

About 1 in 5 cases were hospitalized and most of those developed complications.

Databricks continues to lead the way in engineering innovation, consistently pushing...

Australia’s AI data center boom drove private investment sharply higher, even as weaker household spending exposed a widening economic split. The post AI Data Centers Now Account for 17% of Australia’s Private Investment appeared first on TechRepublic.

"The crown is a weight that crushes. You'll do things that spell death for all involved."

ABC says early renewal for all stations is unprecedented, has no legitimate purpose.