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Cops Hand Motorola £25M No-Bid Deal to Keep 2000-Era Radios Alive
UK police have awarded a no‑competition £25 million (≈$31.8 million) extension to Motorola and Sepura to keep the legacy Airwave TETRA radios operational. The Airwave replacement, now slated for 2029, is twelve years behind schedule and £3 billion (≈$3.8 billion) over budget. The National Audit Office says about £11 billion (≈$14 billion) has been spent on maintaining the outdated system, while Motorola’s involvement in both Airwave and the new Emergency Services Network (ESN) sparked Competition and Markets Authority scrutiny and led the vendor to abandon a £400 million (≈$508 million) ESN contract. A new Crown Commercial Service framework is expected to open in early 2027 to finally transition blue‑light agencies to modern broadband communications.
Bullet Train Upgrade Brings 5G Windows and Noise-Cancelling Cabins to Japan
Japanese rail operator JR Central announced that its Shinkansen will feature premium private suites equipped with windows that embed 5G antennas and cabins fitted with NTT’s Personalized Sound Zone noise‑cancelling system. The antennas, supplied by AGC, weave microscopic wires into...
AI-Powered Mainframe Exits Are a Bubble Set to Pop: Gartner
Gartner warns that more than 70% of AI‑driven mainframe exit projects launched in 2026 will fall short of promised benefits, citing the limited ability of generative AI to automate legacy code conversion and preserve performance. The firm predicts that by...
GitHub Invokes Spirit of Phabricator with Preview of Stacked PRs
GitHub has introduced Stacked PRs, a private‑preview feature that lets developers create a series of dependent pull requests. Each PR in the stack can be reviewed and merged independently, provided its predecessors are merged first, encouraging smaller, more manageable changes....
Physicist Reckons Two-Button Calculator Can Do All Elementary Math
A post‑doctoral researcher at Jagiellonian University proposes a two‑button calculator that can perform all functions of a standard scientific calculator. The device relies on a single binary operator, eml(x, y)=exp(x) − ln(y), combined with the constant 1 to generate arithmetic, algebraic, trigonometric functions and...
Fake Linux Leader Using Slack to Con Devs Into Giving up Their Secrets
In early April, a threat actor impersonated a Linux Foundation leader on Slack and lured open‑source developers from the TODO and CNCF projects to a spoofed Google Sites page. The page mimicked a Google Workspace sign‑in flow, prompting users to...
WARNING: Oracle's AI Obsession Could Mean Higher Prices and Worse Support
Oracle is accelerating AI‑focused datacenter expansion, highlighted by a projected $300 billion five‑year deal with OpenAI. To fund the build‑out, the company has lifted its fiscal 2026 restructuring cost by $500 million to $2.1 billion and already raised $18 billion in debt, with more...
Veterans Affairs Has Lost Track of Software Licenses Amid $985M Bill
The GAO report reveals the Department of Veterans Affairs struggles to accurately track software licenses within its roughly $985 million annual software budget. The VA has identified its five biggest vendors but cannot determine if it is over‑ or under‑licensed. Preliminary...
Adobe Finally Patches PDF Pest After Months of Abuse
Adobe released a patch on April 11 for CVE‑2026‑34621, a critical zero‑day in Acrobat and Reader that allowed arbitrary code execution on Windows and macOS. The flaw was actively exploited for months, using heavily obfuscated JavaScript to profile victims and deliver...
Growing Void Between Enterprise and Frontier AI Puts Open Weights Models in the Spotlight
Open‑weights AI models such as Google’s Gemma 4, Qwen 3.5 and Microsoft’s MAI are transitioning from research curiosities to enterprise‑grade products. These models can run on a single RTX Pro 6000 GPU costing around $9,000, or even on modern CPU servers, dramatically lowering deployment...
Apple Update Looks Like Czech Mate for Locked-Out iPhone User
Apple’s latest iOS 26.4 update unintentionally disabled the háček character on the lock‑screen Czech keyboard, preventing users from entering alphanumeric passcodes that include the symbol. University student Connor Byrne, who relied on a custom passcode containing the háček, was locked...
How Salesforce and ServiceNow Are Squaring Off in the Battle for the Helpdesk
Salesforce’s newly launched Agentforce IT service, now six months old, has attracted 200 sign‑ups – less than 0.2% of its 150,000‑customer base – and the company claims it has won five customers from ServiceNow. ServiceNow still dominates the ITSM space...
Snowflake Manager Explains the 'Spider-Man' Theory of AI Agent Data Access
Snowflake says the biggest hurdle for AI agents is clean, accessible, governed data, not model quality. To address this, the company is building an interoperable stack around the Apache Iceberg open table format, including Iceberg REST and Polaris‑based governance. The...
Red Hat RHELocates Its Chinese Engineering Team to India
Red Hat has terminated its entire engineering team in China, laying off an estimated 300‑500 staff and relocating most positions to India. The move follows a memo from CTO Chris Wright outlining a new location strategy that prioritizes hiring in...
Microsoft's Copilot Strategy Is Just More User Abuse From Redmond, Says Mozilla
Mozilla has publicly condemned Microsoft for embedding its Copilot AI across Windows without explicit user consent, labeling the practice as user abuse. In response to mounting criticism, Microsoft announced it will pull Copilot from several built‑in apps such as Snipping...
