In 1997, as the term “dotcom” came to describe a wave of internet start-ups, web portal king Yahoo! acquired a free web email service called RocketMail and launched Yahoo! Mail, a service to compete with Microsoft’s recently acquired Hotmail.

Seven years later, Google would launch Gmail with a gigabyte of free storage, a bold move at the time; Not to be outdone, Yahoo! responded by upping the free storage of its service to a terabyte.

The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) closed all its clinic locations statewide on Thursday following a ransomware attack.

UMMC has over 10,000 employees and, as one of the largest employers in Mississippi, operates seven hospitals, 35 clinics, and more than 200 telehealth sites statewide. The medical center includes the state’s only children’s hospital, only Level I trauma center, only organ and bone marrow transplant program, and the only Telehealth Center of Excellence, one of two across the United States.

As revealed on Thursday afternoon, the cyberattack took down many of its IT systems and blocked access to the Epic electronic medical records. While UMMC cancelled outpatient and ambulatory surgeries/procedures and imaging appointments, officials said hospital services continue via downtime procedures.

UMMC is now investigating the incident with assistance from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI.

“We have activated our Emergency Operations Plan and are working with authorities including the FBI and Homeland Security, who are helping us to evaluate this situation and determine next steps,” the UMMC said.

When this article was published, the UMCC’s website was still down, and officials said that the hospital had shut down all IT systems while they assessed the attack’s impact.

“We are still evaluating the extent of systems impacted. As a precaution, we have shut down all our network systems and will conduct risk assessments before bringing anything back online. In-person class schedules remain normal,” they said.

Officials confirm ransomware attack 

Hospital officials have also revealed during a press conference on Thursday afternoon that they are communicating with the ransomware operation behind the attack and working with authorities on the next steps, according to The Daily Mississippian.

“The attackers have communicated to us and we are working with the authorities and specialists on next steps. We do not know how long this situation may last,” said LouAnn Woodward, the dean of the school of medicine at UMMC.

“Patients in our hospital and our emergency department are being cared for. Clinical equipment and operations remain functional. We are using our downtime procedures. For our students, in-person classes will continue as scheduled.”

“All of our equipment works. All of our patients are being taken care of safely. There will be no patient impact as a result of this downtime,” Dr. Alan Jones, associate vice chancellor for health affairs at UMMC, told reporters.

No ransomware group has claimed responsibility for this attack, as they’re likely still negotiating with the UMMC and want to pressure it into paying an extortion demand.

However, with ransomware involved, data may have also been stolen and will be used as additional leverage to convince the hospital to pay.

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IEEE has enhanced its standing as a trusted, neutral authority on the role of technology in climate change mitigation and adaption. Last year it became the first technical association to be invited to a U.N. Conference of the Parties on Climate Change.

IEEE representatives participated in several sessions at COP30, held from 11 to 20 November in Belém, Brazil. More than 56,000 delegates attended, including policymakers, technologists, and representatives from industry, finance, and development agencies.

Following the conference, IEEE helped host the selective International Symposium on Achieving a Sustainable Climate. The International Telecommunication Union and IEEE hosted ISASC on 16 and 17 December at ITU’s headquarters in Geneva. Among the more than 100 people who attended were U.N. agency representatives, diplomats, senior leaders from academia, and experts from government, industry, nongovernment organizations, and standards development bodies.

Power and energy expert Saifur Rahman, the 2023 IEEE president, led IEEE’s delegation at both events. Rahman is the immediate past chair of IEEE’s Technology for a Sustainable Climate Matrix Organization, which coordinates, communicates, and amplifies the organization’s efforts.

IEEE’s evolving role at COP

IEEE first attended a COP in 2021.

“Over successive COPs, IEEE’s role has evolved from contributing individual technical sessions to being recognized as a trusted partner in climate action,” Rahman noted in a summary of COP30. “There is [a] growing demand for engineering insight, not just to discuss technologies but [also] to help design pathways for deployment, capacity-building, and long-term resilience.”

Joining Rahman at COP30 were IEEE Fellow Claudio Canizares and IEEE Member Filipe Emídio Tôrres.

Canizares is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, and the executive director of the university’s sustainable energy institute.

Tôrres chairs the IEEE Centro-Norte Brasil Section (Brazil Chapter). An entrepreneur and a former professor, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the University of Brasilia. He also represented the IEEE Young Professionals group while attending the conference.

In the Engineering for Climate Resilience: Water Planning, Energy Transition, Biodiversity session, Rahman showed a video from his 2024 visit to Shennongjia, China, where he monitored a clean energy project designed to protect endangered snub-nosed monkeys from human encroachment. The project integrates renewable energy, which helps preserve the forest and its wildlife.

Rahman also chaired a session at the Sustainable Development Goal Pavilion on balancing decarbonization efforts between industrialized and emerging economies.

Additionally, he participated in a joint panel discussion hosted by IEEE and the World Federation of Engineering Organizations on engineering strategies for climate resilience, including energy transition and biodiversity.

Rahman, Canizares, and Tôrres took part in a session on clean-tech solutions for a sustainable climate, hosted by the International Youth Nuclear Congress. The topics included fossil fuel–free electricity for communications in remote areas and affordable electricity solutions for off-grid areas.

The three also joined several panels organized by the IYNC that addressed climate resilience, career pathways in sustainability, and a mentoring program.

“Over successive COPs, IEEE’s role has evolved from contributing individual technical sessions to being recognized as a trusted partner in climate action.” —Saifur Rahman, 2023 IEEE president

The IYNC hosted the Voices of Transition: Including Pathways to a Clean Energy Future session, for which Tôrres and Rahman were panelists. They discussed the need to include underrepresented and marginalized groups, which often get overlooked in projects that convert communities to renewable energy.

Rahman, Canizares, and Tôrres visited the COP Village, where they met several of the 5,000 Indigenous leaders participating in the conference and discussed potential partnerships and collaborations. Climate change has made the land where the Indigenous people live more susceptible to severe droughts and wildfires, particularly in the Amazon region.

Rahman and Tôrres took a field trip to the Federal University of Para, where they met several faculty members and students and toured the LASSE engineering lab.

A meaningful experience

Tôrres, who says representing IEEE at COP30 was transformative, wrote a detailed report about the event.

“The experience reaffirmed my belief that engineering and technology, when combined with respect for cultural diversity, can play a critical role in shaping a more sustainable and equitable world,” he wrote. “It highlighted the importance of combining cutting-edge technological solutions with Indigenous wisdom and cultural knowledge to address the climate crisis.”

Rahman and Canizares give an overview of their COP30 experiences in an IEEE webinar.

“IEEE has a place at the table,” Rahman says in the video. “We want to showcase outside our comfort zone what IEEE can do. We go to all these global events so that our name becomes a familiar term. We are the first technical association organization ever to go to COP and talk about engineering.”

Canizares added that IEEE is now collaborating closely with the United Nations.

“This is an important interaction. And I think, moving forward, IEEE will become more relevant, particularly in the context of technology deployment,” he said. “As governments start technology deployments, they will see IEEE as a provider of solutions.”

ISASC takeaways

Rahman was the general chair of the ISASC event, which focused on the delivery and deployment of clean energy. Among the presenters were IEEE members including Canizares, Paulina Chan, Surekha Deshmukh, Ashutosh Dutta, Tariq Durrani, Samina Husain, Bruce Kraemer, Bruno Meyer, Carlo Alberto Nucci, and Seizo Onoe.

Sessions were organized around six themes: energy transition, information and communication technology, financing, case studies, technical standards, and public-private collaborations. A detailed report includes the discussions, insights, and opportunities identified throughout ISASC.

Here are some key takeaways.

• Although the technology exists to transition to renewable energy, most power grid systems are not ready. Deployment is increasingly constrained by transmission bottlenecks, interconnection delays, permitting challenges, and system flexibility. There’s also a skills shortage.
• Energy transition pathways must be region-specific and should consider local resources, social conditions, funding opportunities, and development priorities.
• Information and communication technologies are central to climate mitigation solutions, despite growing concerns about their environmental impact. Even though the technologies are used in beneficial ways, such as early-warning systems for natural disasters and smart water management, they also are driving the rapid growth of data centers for artificial intelligence applications—which has increased energy prices and driven up water demand.
• Technical standards are a means of accelerating adoption, interoperability, and trust in green technology. There needs to be greater coordination among standards development organizations, particularly at the convergence of energy systems, information technologies, and AI. Fragmented standards hinder interoperability. The lack of technical standards is a major constraint on project financing, limiting investors’ confidence and slowing technology deployment.
• Training and outreach efforts are important for successfully implementing standards, especially in developing regions. IEEE’s global membership and regional sections can be critical channels to address the needs.

A technology assessment tool

As part of ISASC, IEEE presented a technology assessment tool prototype. The web-based platform is designed to help policymakers, practitioners, and investors compare technology options against climate goals.

The tool can run a comparative analysis of sustainable climate technologies and integrate publicly available, expert-validated data.

IEEE can help the world meet its goals

The ISASC report concluded that by connecting engineering expertise with real-world deployment challenges, IEEE is working to translate global climate goals into measurable actions.

The discussions highlighted that the path forward lies less in inventing new technologies and more in aligning systems to deliver ones that already exist.

Summaries of COP30 and ISASC are available on the IEEE Technology for a Sustainable Climate website.

Podcast listeners seem to prefer YouTube and Spotify over Apple. Apple wants to change that.

Apple is finally introducing videos to podcasts as it takes aim at the market’s reigning leaders YouTube and Spotify.

But instead of using RSS for the videos, Apple said it is bringing in Http Live Streaming (HLS) technology, which lets consumers’ devices adapt to changing network conditions by automatically raising or lowering the quality of the stream.

Plus, users will be able to toggle between watching podcasts with videos turned on or off.

The company is also introducing dynamic advertising, which will allow podcasters to swap ads in or out. YouTube and Spotify have both said they would launch the tool, but are yet to do so.

Apple does not charge hosting providers or creators to distribute podcasts on Apple Podcasts – though it will begin charging participating ad networks an impression-based fee to deliver dynamic ads in HLS video podcasts later this year, it said.

“20 years ago, Apple helped take podcasting mainstream by adding podcasts to iTunes, and more than a decade ago, we introduced the dedicated Apple Podcasts app,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services. The new step is a “defining milestone”, he added.

The consumer tech giant was one of the first to popularise the concept of podcasts all the way back in 2005. But in recent years, its leadership in the area has dwindled.

Recent data showed that 39pc of podcast listeners said they prefer YouTube as their go-to platform, 21pc Spotify, and only 8pc chose Apple. Last year, YouTube said that it had reached 1bn monthly podcast listeners.

There’s a few reasons Apple Podcasts lost its steam. One, for most of its existence, the service didn’t generate revenue from podcasts. Apple only launched podcast subscriptions in 2021, and at that point, hadn’t even considered introducing ads.

Meanwhile, not everyone uses Apple products, with Google’s Android phones remaining the most popular mobile operating system worldwide. Meaning, for a large period of time, only Apple users would have been able to tune into podcasts on its platforms.

However, that changed in 2024 with the introduction of an Apple Podcasts web app, available regardless of whether users are on a Mac or not.

Updated, 11.43am, 20 February 2026: This article was amended to include correct figures in relation to podcast listener preferences.

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Despite growing chatter about a future when much human work is automated by AI, one of the ironies of this current tech boom is how stubbornly reliant on human beings it remains, specifically the process of training AI models using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).

At its simplest, RLHF is a tutoring system: after an AI is trained on curated data, it still makes mistakes or sounds robotic. Human contractors are then hired en masse by AI labs to rate and rank a new model’s outputs while it trains, and the model learns from their ratings, adjusting its behavior to offer higher-rated outputs. This process is all the more important as AI expands to produce multimedia outputs like video, audio, and imagery which may have more nuanced and subjective measures of quality.

Historically, this tutoring process has been a massive logistical headache and PR nightmare for AI companies, relying on fragmented networks of foreign contractors and static labeling pools in specific, low-income geographic hubs, cast by the media as low wage — even exploitative. It’s also inefficient: requiring AI labs wait weeks or months for a single batch of feedback, delaying model progress.

Now a new startup has emerged to make the process far more efficient: Rapidata‘s platform effectively “gamifies” RLHF by pushing said review tasks around the globe to nearly 20 million users of popular apps, including Duolingo or Candy Crush, in the form of short, opt-in review tasks they can choose to complete in place of watching mobile ads, with data sent back to a commissioning AI lab instantly.

As shared with VentureBeat in a press release, this platform allows AI labs to “iterate on models in near-real-time,” significantly shortening development timelines compared to traditional methods.

CEO and founder Jason Corkill stated in the same release that Rapidata makes “human judgment available at a global scale and near real time, unlocking a future where AI teams can run constant feedback loops and build systems that evolve every day instead of every release cycle.””

Rapidata treats RLHF as high-speed infrastructure rather than a manual labor problem. Today, the company exclusively announced to us at VentureBeat its emergence with an $8.5 million seed round co-led by Canaan Partners and IA Ventures, with participation from Acequia Capital and BlueYard, to scale its unique approach to on-demand human data.

The pub conversation that built a human cloud

The genesis of Rapidata was born not in a boardroom, but at a table over a few beers. When Corkill was a student at ETH Zurich, working in robotics and computer vision, when he hit the wall that every AI engineer eventually faces: the data annotation bottleneck.

“Specifically, I’ve been working in robotics, AI and computer vision for quite a few years now, studied at ETH here in Zurich, and just always was frustrated with data annotation,” Corkill recalled in a recent interview. “Always when you needed humans or human data annotation, that’s kind of when your project was stopped in its tracks, because up until then, you could move it forward by just pushing longer nights. But when you needed the large scale human annotation, you had to go to someone and then wait for a few weeks”.

Frustrated by this delay, Corkill and his co-founders realized that the existing labor model for AI was fundamentally broken for a world moving at the speed of modern compute. While compute scales exponentially, the traditional human workforce—bound by manual onboarding, regional hiring, and slow payment cycles—does not. Rapidata was born from the idea that human judgment could be delivered as a globally distributed, near-instantaneous service.

Technology: Turning digital footprints into training data

The core innovation of Rapidata lies in its distribution method. Rather than hiring full-time annotators in specific regions, Rapidata leverages the existing attention economy of the mobile app world. By partnering with third-party apps like Candy Crush or Duolingo, Rapidata offers users a choice: watch a traditional ad or spend a few seconds providing feedback for an AI model.

“The users are asked, ‘Hey, would you rather instead of watching ads and having, you know, companies buy your eyeballs like that, would you rather like annotate some data, give feedback?’” Corkill explained. According to Corkill, between 50% and 60% of users opt for the feedback task over a traditional video advertisement.

This “crowd intelligence” approach allows AI teams to tap into a diverse, global demographic at an unprecedented scale.

• The global network: Rapidata currently reaches between 15 and 20 million people.

• Massive parallelism: The platform can process 1.5 million human annotations in a single hour.

• Speed: Feedback cycles that previously took weeks or months are reduced to hours or even minutes.

• Quality control: The platform builds trust and expertise profiles for respondents over time, ensuring that complex questions are matched with the most relevant human judges.

• Anonymity: While users are tracked via anonymized IDs to ensure consistency and reliability, Rapidata does not collect personal identities, maintaining privacy while optimizing for data quality.

Online RLHF: Moving into the GPU

The most significant technological leap Rapidata is enabling is what Corkill describes as “online RLHF”. Traditionally, AI is trained in disconnected batches: you train the model, stop, send data to humans, wait weeks for labels, and then resume. This creates a “circle” of information that often lacks fresh human input.

Rapidata is moving this judgment directly into the training loop. Because their network is so fast, they can integrate via API directly with the GPUs running the model.

“We’ve always had this idea of reinforcement learning for human feedback… so far, you always had to do it like in batches,” Corkill said. “Now, if you go all the way down, we have a few clients now where, because we’re so fast, we can be directly, basically in the process, like in in the processor on the GPU right, and the GPU calculate some output, and it can immediately request from us in a distributed fashion. ‘Oh, I need, I need, I need a human to look at this.’ I get the answer and then apply that loss, which has not been possible so far”.

Currently, the platform supports roughly 5,500 humans per minute providing live feedback to models running on thousands of GPUs. This prevents “reward model hacking,” where two AI models trick each other in a feedback loop, by grounding the training in actual human nuance.

Product: Solving for taste and global context

As AI moves beyond simple object recognition into generative media, the requirements for data labeling have evolved from objective tagging to subjective “taste-based” curation. It is no longer just about “is this a cat?” but rather “is this voice synthesis convincing?” or “which of these two summaries feels more professional?”.

Lily Clifford, CEO of the voice AI startup Rime, notes that Rapidata has been transformative for testing models in real-world contexts. “Previously, gathering meaningful feedback meant cobbling together vendors and surveys, segment by segment, or country by country, which didn’t scale,” Clifford said. Using Rapidata, Rime can reach the right audiences—whether in Sweden, Serbia, or the United States—and see how models perform in real customer workflows in days, not months.

“Most models are factually correct, but I’m sure you’re you have received emails that feel, you know, not authentic, right?” Corkill noted. “You can smell an AI email, you can smell an AI image or a video, it’s immediately clear to you… these models still don’t feel human, and you need human feedback to do that”.

The economic and operational shift

From an operational standpoint, Rapidata positions itself as an infrastructure layer that eliminates the need for companies to manage their own custom annotation operations. By providing a scalable network, the company is lowering the barrier to entry for AI teams that previously struggled with the cost and complexity of traditional feedback loops.

Jared Newman of Canaan Partners, who led the investment, suggests that this infrastructure is essential for the next generation of AI. “Every serious AI deployment depends on human judgment somewhere in the lifecycle,” Newman said. “As models move from expertise-based tasks to taste-based curation, the demand for scalable human feedback will grow dramatically”.

A future of human use

While the current focus is on the model labs of the Bay Area, Corkill sees a future where the AI models themselves become the primary customers of human judgment. He calls this “human use”.

In this vision, a car designer AI wouldn’t just generate a generic vehicle; it could programmatically call Rapidata to ask 25,000 people in the French market what they think of a specific aesthetic, iterate on that feedback, and refine its design within hours.

“Society is in constant flux,” Corkill noted, addressing the trend of using AI to simulate human behavior. “If they simulate a society now, the simulation will be stable for and maybe mirror ours for a few months, but then it completely changes, because society has changed and has developed completely differently”.

By creating a distributed, programmatic way to access human brain capacity worldwide, Rapidata is positioning itself as the vital interconnect between silicon and society. With $8.5 million in new funding, the company plans to move aggressively to ensure that as AI scales, the human element is no longer a bottleneck, but a real-time feature.

The company’s customised AI chips aim to achieve cheaper and faster results than traditional AI hardware.

Toronto-based start-up Taalas has raised $169m for its specialised AI hardware models.

Total investment in the company stands at $219m, with funding from Quiet Capital and Fidelity, among others, according to Reuters.

In a blogpost from CEO Ljubisa Bajic announcing the release of its first models, the company said it wants to mitigate the “high latency and astronomical cost” of AI, and that its specialised method is faster and cheaper than traditional AI chip approaches.

The company said it took a team of 24 and a spend of $30m since its founding less than three years ago to bring to market its first product, a hard-wired Llama 3.1 8B, which is available as both a chatbot demo and an inference API service.

The company’s aim is to mitigate the need for vast and expensive data centres through the principles of specialisation, merging storage with computation, and simplification.

Taalas said its “platform for transforming any AI model into custom silicon” means that “from the moment a previously unseen model is received, it can be realised in hardware in only two months”.

It claimed its hardware output is “an order of magnitude faster, cheaper and lower power than software-based implementations”, achieved through physically customising chips depending on the bespoke needs of the AI model in question.

Taalas claimed its silicon Llama chip, for example, is nearly 10 times faster than the current state of the art, costs 20 times less to build and consumes 10 times less power.

Taalas aims to release two further models in 2026.

AI chipmaking giant Nvidia this week announced a huge deal with Meta to provide millions of chips for Meta’s AI infrastructure in exchange for billions of dollars.

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The Nothing Phone (4a) series is shaping up to be more expensive than its predecessor according to fresh leaks detailing pricing, specs and release dates ahead of the company’s March 5 launch event.

A new report from Dealabs suggests the Nothing Phone (4a) will start at around €400. This marks roughly a €50 increase over the Phone (3a), with pricing said to vary slightly by region. For instance, Germany and Spain will reportedly see a €389 starting price. Meanwhile, France, Belgium and Italy could see it land at €409. A 12GB RAM variant is expected to cost between €429 and €449.

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro could see an even steeper jump. Dealabs claims pricing will begin at €479 in Germany and Spain. This rises to €499 in France, Belgium and Italy — around €90 more than the previous Pro model. A higher-tier 12GB version could reach as much as €569 depending on the market.