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United States President Donald Trump has signalled he intends to move forward with plans to dismantle the Department of Education, despite mixed signals from his administration. “Well, I want to just do it. I mean, we’re starting the process,” Trump said at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office on Thursday. A directive to wind down the Department of Education was expected to be among the orders Trump signed on Thursday. But in the hours leading up to the Trump’s public appearance in the Oval Office, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced reports of an announcement as “more fake…

California cyber exposure management firm Armis on Thursday announced the acquisition of Otorio, a deal that adds technology for operational technology (OT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) security to its product lines. The transaction, valued in the range of $120 million, gives Armis a path to market an on-prem CPS solution for organizations or segments of an organization that operate in air-gapped or sequestered environments. “We are seeing unprecedented demand across all industries but for some specific verticals, customers require a hybrid environment for complete protection. Through this acquisition, Armis can now offer an on-premises solution for customers that require a…

DENVER (AP) — A federal judge is set to hear arguments Friday over whether he should block immigration agents from conducting arrests at schools under a Trump administration policy that has yet to be acted upon. Denver Public Schools is asking U.S. District Judge Daniel Domenico to block immigration enforcement in schools across the country while its lawsuit challenging the new policy plays out in court.The suit says the possibility of routine immigration arrests in its schools has led to a drop in attendance. It also says the district has had to divert resources to respond to fear among students…

VIENNA (AP) — The aristocrats of the Habsburg royal court who danced in the first of Vienna ’s famed balls in the 18th century could never have imagined how the hallmark of the Austrian capital’s social and cultural scene would evolve.Today, teenagers learn to waltz by watching YouTube videos while ladies shed their elbow-length gloves to better swipe on smartphones.More than 450 balls occur annually in Vienna, starting Nov. 11 to mark the opening of the carnival season to Ash Wednesday before Lent begins. Professional guilds throughout the city host their own events, like the Ball of the Viennese Chimney…

Last week’s $1.4 billion cryptocurrency heist was the result of a multi-pronged attack that combined social engineering, stolen AWS session tokens, MFA bypasses, and a seemingly benign JavaScript file. That’s the conclusion from forensics experts at Mandiant called in to figure out how North Korea’s Lazarus hacking crew was able to compromise ByBit’s Ethereum cold wallet system in the biggest documented cryptocurrency theft ever. Working alongside the Safe{Wallet} team to piece together the chain of events, Mandiant said the attackers first targeted a developer by posing as a trusted open-source contributor. The developer, one of a few Safe{Wallet} personnel with…

The launch of Anthropic’s coding tool, Claude Code, is off to a rocky start. According to reports on GitHub, Claude Code’s auto-update function contained buggy commands that rendered some workstations unstable and broken. When Claude Code was installed at the “root” or “superuser” levels — permissions that give programs the ability to make operating system-level changes — the buggy commands would let applications modify typically restricted file directories and, in the worst-case scenario, “brick” systems. The problematic Claude Code auto-update commands changed the access permissions of certain critical system files. Permissions define which programs and users can read or modify…

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is investigating the data-labeling startup Scale AI for compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act, TechCrunch has learned. That’s a federal law that regulates unpaid wages, misclassification of employees as contractors, and illegal retaliation against workers. The investigation has been active since at least August 2024, a document seen by TechCrunch shows. And it’s ongoing, according to a person directly familiar with the matter.  The mere existence of an investigation doesn’t mean Scale AI has done anything wrong, of course, and the investigation could find in favor of the company or be dismissed. Scale…

OpenAI’s flagship AI chatbot, ChatGPT, returned to solid growth in the latter half of 2024, according to a new report published on Thursday by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While it took ChatGPT nine months to grow from 100 million weekly active users in November 2023 to 200 million in August 2024, it’s now taken less than six months for the app to double those numbers yet again, the report found. Shortly after its November 2022 release as a research preview, ChatGPT became the fastest app ever to reach 100 million monthly active users — a milestone it hit in…

AI company founders have a reputation for making bold claims about the technology’s potential to reshape fields, particularly the sciences. But Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief science officer, has a more measured take. In an essay published to X on Thursday, Wolf said that he feared AI becoming “yes-men on servers” absent a breakthrough in AI research. He elaborated that current AI development paradigms won’t yield AI capable of outside-the-box, creative problem-solving — the kind of problem-solving that wins Nobel Prizes. “The main mistake people usually make is thinking [people like] Newton or Einstein were just scaled-up good…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Georgetown Law School’s dean on Thursday rebuffed an unusual warning from the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., that his office won’t hire the private school’s students if it doesn’t eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.Dean William Treanor told acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin that the First Amendment prohibits the government from dictating what Georgetown’s faculty teach or how to teach it.“Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as…