Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.

The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave.

About 10,000 people have lost their jobs so far, the BBC reported, citing an unnamed employee at the company, which is chaired by Larry Ellison, the billionaire ally of Donald Trump. Ellison is worth $189bn and is the world’s sixth richest person, Forbes estimates.

Michael Shepherd, a senior manager at Oracle, who was not affected by the cuts, posted on the social media site LinkedIn that there had been a “significant reduction in force” at the business.

Shepherd said the decision had affected “senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers, and technical specialists with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, government and sovereign cloud environments, and enterprise-scale systems”.

That's just what we need. More senior tech workers out of work in Austin. Thank god we now have a fresh supply!

A Korean developer named Sigrid Jin—featured in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month for having consumed 25 billion Claude Code tokens—woke up at 4 a.m. to the news. He sat down, ported the core architecture to Python from scratch using an AI orchestration tool called oh-my-codex, and pushed claw-code before sunrise. The repo hit 30,000 GitHub stars faster than any repository in history.

I never thought I'd be posting a Prince Harry story in Technology, but it's 2026, and all bets are off.

The Duke of Sussex has welcomed two landmark lawsuits against major tech companies, declaring: “Finally, some truth and accountability has arrived.”

In a speech in Washington DC to the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) global summit on privacy, AI governance and cybersecurity law, Prince Harry said he had done a “deep dive into the tech-fuelled world in which my children – all our children – are growing up”.

He spoke of “harrowing stories” of how time spent on the big tech companies’ platforms had led to “grave and irreversible harm”.

Referring to the two cases last week, in which a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375m (£280m) in civil penalties and a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6m damages to a 20-year-old woman, Harry said: “About bloody time!”

To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let's quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.

If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?

The Match Group strikes again!

he open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.

Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that's not good enough.

Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.

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cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/45352452

Call me crazy, but I don’t think an official government app should be loading executable code from a random person’s GitHub account. Or tracking your GPS location in the background. Or silently stripping privacy consent dialogs from every website you visit through its built-in browser. And yet here we are.

The White House released a new app last week for iOS and Android, promising “unparalleled access to the Trump Administration.” A security researcher, who goes by Thereallo, pulled the APKs and decompiled them — extracting the actual compiled code and examining what’s really going on under the hood. The propaganda stuff — cherry-picked news, a one-tap button to report your neighbors to ICE, a text that auto-populates “Greatest President Ever!” — which Engadget covered, is embarrassing enough. The code underneath is something else entirely.

Let’s start with the most alarming behavior. Every time you open a link in the app’s built-in browser, the app silently injects JavaScript and CSS into the page. Here’s what it does:

It hides: Cookie banners GDPR consent dialogs OneTrust popups Privacy banners Login walls Signup walls Upsell prompts Paywall elements CMP (Consent Management Platform) boxes

It forces body { overflow: auto !important } to re-enable scrolling on pages where consent dialogs lock the scroll. Then it sets up a MutationObserver to continuously nuke any consent elements that get dynamically added.

An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.

Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro – but it's just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon.

Fruit-sniffers extraordaire 9-to-5 Mac got the news yesterday, complete with official confirmation from Apple itself. It's official and it's happened, but there have been warning signs for months – in November 2025, Bloomberg's Matt Gurman said "The Mac Pro is on the back burner."

The phantom fruit-flingers of Silicon Valley launched the seven-thousand-buck Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro in June 2023, with an M2 Ultra SoC. It sported seven PCIe slots – but the problem was that cash-rich customers couldn't add the sorts of expansion that normally go into a PCIe slot… to the extent that Apple publishes a page about PCIe cards you can install in your Mac Pro (2023). Notably, the machine did not support add-on GPUs: only the GPU that's integrated into the CPU complex along with the machine's RAM and primary flash storage. The machine also had no RAM expansion whatsoever.

Presumably, this limited its appeal for many traditional buyers, and the machine never saw an M3 or M4 model, let alone the M5 SoC that The Register covered shortly before Bloomberg called the Arm64 cheesegrater's fate.

The young woman at the heart of what has been called the tech industry’s “big tobacco” moment was on YouTube at six and Instagram by nine. More than a decade later, she says, she still can’t live without the social media she became addicted to.

“I can’t, it’s too hard to be without it,” Kaley, now 20, told a jury at Los Angeles’ superior court. This week, five men and seven women handed down a verdict on the design of two of the world’s most popular apps that vindicated Kaley’s position.

The ruling sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and sparked hope among families and child safety campaigners that change may finally be coming to social media. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Google’s YouTube were found liable for deliberately designing addictive products used by Kaley and millions of other young people.

It was one case centred on the suffering of one young person who became depressed at 10 and self-harmed, but Kaley, referred to by her first name or the initials KGM in order to protect her privacy, was the figurehead for a much bigger fight.

“We wanted them to feel it,” one of the jurors explained to reporters. “We wanted them to realise this was unacceptable.”

Yekaterina Chudnovsky, online biographies say, is a mother-of-four who “enjoys spending time with her family and teaching them the importance of giving back and helping others”. They add that Ukrainian-born Chudnovsky, known as Katie, finds sanctuary in walks on the beach.

In interviews, Chudnovsky has spoken warmly about her commitment to philanthropy, her dedication to supporting cancer research and her work as a lawyer for an unnamed global technology firm. Pornography is never mentioned.

Now, it may become unavoidable. After the death of Chudnovsky’s husband, Leonid Radvinsky, from cancer last week at the age of 43, she is now understood to have a controlling interest through a family trust in the London-based adult content site, OnlyFans.

Chudnovsky is set to have a crucial role in deciding what happens to the business that made her husband a billionaire before he turned 40. The family stake is valued at about $5.5bn (£4.1bn).

Chudnovsky’s views on pornography will determine the site’s future business model, and whether it continues to generate huge sums of money by taking a 20% cut from the earnings of about 4 million content creators globally, a large proportion of whom generate money for the business by undressing and performing explicit content on the platform.