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Firm faces quandary of wanting to help the environment, but also wanting to force AI on everyone

Microsoft says it matched its entire electricity consumption with renewable energy last year. The bad news is it also increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25 percent due to datacenter construction.

The cloud and software biz has released a 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report [PDF], claiming its environmental sustainability work is entering a new phase due to rapid technological change.

A global shift towards AI is reshaping economies, the report claims, which is becoming “foundational” to how technology is built and used.

Producing the infrastructure to support AI, however, is also upping demand for energy, water, land, and materials required to support it, Microsoft admits.

The foreword, penned by President Brad Smith and Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa, says that “AI can deliver broad societal, economic, and environmental benefits,” and “We do not see these dynamics as a reason to step back. We see them as a mandate to lead differently.”

In 2020, Microsoft set itself the goal of becoming “carbon-negative” by 2030. Its own figures show emissions heading only upwards, from 13 million tons of CO₂ equivalent in 2020, to 20 million tons in 2025.

However, Microsoft estimates that without the carbon reduction initiatives it has already put in place, emissions would now stand at 34 million tons.

We asked Microsoft what this meant for its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030. It has yet to reply. 

As noted previously, Microsoft’s rise in GHGs is primarily driven by the expansion of its datacenter infrastructure, though it also points to a decision to stop purchasing non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates.

The construction spike means that Scope 3 emissions are still the largest part of Microsoft’s carbon footprint, but 2025 saw a growing contribution from Scope 2, due to generation of energy the company purchased. These represent 13 percent of total emissions – up from 2 percent in 2024.

This underscores the growing role energy systems play in shaping environmental outcomes and why advancing carbon-free energy sources remains critical to long-term progress, the report says.

When it comes to water consumption, another hot topic for those living near to datacenters, Microsoft says it focuses on cooling systems, improving water usage effectiveness (WUE), and reducing reliance on municipal water supplies.

It claims the facilities it owns and operates achieved a 25 percent reduction in WUE since the 2022 baseline. The exact figures listed in Microsoft’s Environmental Data Fact Sheet put the company’s total global water withdrawal for 2025 at 13,266 million litres (3,504 million gallons), and total water consumption at 8,170 million litres (2,158 million gallons).

For the first time, Microsoft claims to have replenished more than it withdrew during 2025, returning 14,278 million liters (3,771 million gallons).

Elsewhere, the corporation says its Circular Centers program reused 92 percent of decommissioned servers and their components.

In the past, Microsoft said it tried to cut the emissions from building datacenters by using concrete mixes with lower overall embodied carbon, and it experimented with facilities made out of wood, estimated to produce a carbon footprint 65 percent lower. ®

A new version of the RedHook Android malware abuses the Android Wireless Debugging (Wireless ADB) mechanism in a novel way to gain shell-level privileges without requiring a computer connection.

Researchers at cybersecurity company Group-IB analyzed the new release of the mobile malware and say that it significantly expands its capabilities compared to the previous variant documented in 2025.

At the same time, the malware retains its remote access trojan (RAT) features, allowing it to stream the screen, intercept keystrokes, automate UI interactions, and steal credentials.

Autonomous Wireless ADB abuse

ADB (Android Debug Bridge) is Google’s debugging interface that lets a user control an Android device from a command line.

The system, which runs on an Android device as an ADB daemon, enables executing shell commands from a computer running the ADB client.

Wireless ADB, first introduced in Android 11, provides the same capability wirelessly, without requiring the devices to be linked via a USB cable.

RedHook essentially turns the phone into its own ADB client by tricking the victim into granting it Accessibility permissions, which let it automatically manipulate Settings, enable Developer Options, and activate Wireless Debugging.

After that, the malware retrieves the pairing code displayed on the screen and connects to the phone’s ADB service via the loopback interface (127.0.0.1).

Once paired, the malware gains shell (UID 2000) privileges, which are significantly more powerful than those available to normal Android apps, though not root-level.

The entire attack chain does not require the device to be rooted, so it works across all Android devices as long as the user is tricked into approving the Accessibility Service permission request.

Next, the malware deploys a Shizuku-based framework to execute shell commands, grant itself additional permissions, modify protected Android settings, silently install or remove applications, and perform various operations without displaying user dialogs.

Shizuku is a legitimate Android utility popular among power users and developers, and does not require a rooted device.

RedHook executes Shizuku code as part of its attack chain, using it as a privileged server (libmx.so) to invoke privileged Android APIs as UID 2000.

According to Group-IB’s report, the current version of the malware supports 53 server-issued commands, which include:

• Screen streaming and screenshot capturing
• Simulate taps, swipes, gestures, dragging, and long clicks
• Device locking/unlocking
• Install, launch, and uninstall apps
• Collect contacts, SMS, and applications
• Create overlays or fake verification dialogs
• Activate the camera
• Reboot the device

The malware’s multiple persistence mechanisms are also highlighted in Group-IB’s report.

RedHook uses silent audio playback to increase process priority, WakeLocks to prevent CPU sleep, and two services that restart each other when one is terminated.

Other mechanisms include a five-minute watchdog alarm, automatic restart after device boot, and setting oom_score_adj to -1000 to reduce the likelihood of being killed when available system memory is low.

The latest version of RedHook is distributed through social engineering, via messages and phone calls where attackers impersonate government agencies or financial institutions to direct victims to fake Google Play sites.

Android users are advised to install apps only from Google Play, scrutinize requested permissions at installation, and ensure that Play Protect is active on the device.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

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Consumption rose another 10% while restrictions on most new grid connections remained around Dublin

Electricity used by datacenters in Ireland increased by 10 percent during 2025, despite an effective moratorium on most new datacenter grid connections in the Dublin area.

The latest figures from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country’s metered electricity consumption.

Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015.

According to the CSO, the energy sucked up by massive bit barns increased by 10 percent last year, expanding from 6,973 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2024 to 7,663 GWh in 2025. All other customers consumed just 2 percent more electricity over the same period.

In fact, datacenters used more electricity than urban households, which accounted for 18 percent of metered use, and more than twice the rural-household share of 9 percent.

“Datacenter consumption has grown every single year without exception, more than doubling between 2015 and 2019 from 1,240 GWh to 2,490 GWh, and tripling again between 2019 and 2025, reaching 7,663 GWh,” commented Grzegorz Głaczyński, statistician in the CSO’s Climate and Energy Division.

Things got so bad in Ireland that at one point there were fears that the ever-expanding data dormitories might eat up as much as a third of the Emerald Isle’s electricity by now.

The Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) put an effective moratorium on connecting new server farms to the electricity grid, at least in the Dublin area, where much of the activity tends to concentrate.

This was lifted in December of last year, meaning electricity consumption still rose by a tenth while the moratorium was in place for nearly all of 2025.

Under stricter new regulations, server farm operators seeking a grid connection of more than 10 MW must also now provide generators or battery systems capable of providing the same power. They will be required to feed power back to the national grid, if and when required, a system already pioneered by Microsoft and Digital Realty.

Like a growing number of places, Ireland has also seen protests against datacenters, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that there are understood to be more than 80 of them for a relatively small country of just over 5 million people.

Even in the US, the Trump administration is having to work to defuse public opposition to datacenters, asking the tech giants to commit that their expanding server farm estates won’t spike energy bills or drain local water supplies across the US. ®

OPINION Things you might not know about me. I was the first person to write a popular article about the web. Little did I, or anyone else, know how it would change everything. Our lives were transformed when all of human knowledge became just a click away. That was then. This is now. Today, more web traffic now comes from bots than humans. We’re just picking up AI’s crumbs.

That was not how it was meant to be. Mind you, I was never an internet idealist. I didn’t think the internet would set us free and lead us to a technological paradise. I did think, however, we’d do better than we have. The internet quickly became, as the song goes, for porn. That was relatively harmless, though, compared to doxxing, targeted misinformation, and automated botnets and troll farms. But there was still some good, although it was hard to find at times. And it was all driven by people.

Now it’s another story. Cloudflare’s public Radar “Bot vs Human” tracker is reporting that bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva’s Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at about 53 percent of measured web traffic for the second year in a row, with humans at 47 percent.

Separately, according to Pangram, an AI detection company, on websites such as LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit, “about one in four long-form items were fully AI-generated.”

The company went on to report that “LinkedIn was the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40 percent of long-form posts [were] flagged as fully AI-generated. However, if we included mixed AI and human content, X/Twitter was the worst off: almost half of X articles were either fully AI-generated (23.9 percent) or AI-assisted/mixed (22.9 percent), with only 53.2 percent of X articles flagging as fully human-authored.”

There are that many flesh-and-blood people still posting on LinkedIn and Twitter? Based on what I’ve been seeing, I’d have guessed there were fewer.

So, with the web increasingly written and consumed by AI, where does that leave us, exactly? Nowhere good.

It’s not just online. AI is everywhere. A non-fiction writer friend of mine “wrote” a novel last year using AI as a goof. It was, well, awful. But he put it online to see what would happen. A year and a half later, it’s still bringing in a few thousand dollars a month. That’s a lot better than many full-time, mid-tier novelists I know are doing.

Of course, AI isn’t actually writing anything. It’s really a copy-and-paste scam on an industrial scale. OpenAI and the other AI powers claim it’s not so. However, a recent court filing by the New York Times and others alleges that Vincent Monaco, who leads privacy engineering at OpenAI, acknowledged in a deposition that “OpenAI had searched training datasets and output data despite the company’s initial claims that it couldn’t access that data. The outlets also alleged OpenAI deleted logs, a violation of the court’s preservation orders.”

As it happens, one of the publishers suing OpenAI is Ziff-Davis, which published my web article back in 1993. Since then, it’s published thousands of my Linux and open source news stories, how-tos, interviews, and features. So, when someone accuses me of using AI in my Linux stories, my reply is “Where do you think AI got that information and phrasing in the first place? Hello! It was me.”

Just go ahead and cut me a check, OpenAI, and all will be forgiven.

That said, another AI problem I’m all too painfully aware of is that you can’t trust AI’s answers. When AI tells you something about Linux, for example, it’s not just quoting me, the Linux Kernel Mailing List, or Linux Weekly News. No, it’s also pulling data from Ima Moron, a poster from a deservedly obscure subreddit.

Repeat after me: AI isn’t intelligent at all. It’s just a copy-and-paste of words that are likely to go together. It may sound right, but it often isn’t. Confidence is why so many buy AI garbage as gospel truth. You really can’t trust it.

The reason I use Perplexity as my search engine isn’t that it’s more accurate than other AI LLMs; it’s that it shows me its sources. I can see if what it just turned up is the real thing or just BS. Guess what? It’s often crap.

It’s only going to get worse. I saw the AI model collapse coming back in 2025. It’s here now. When I dive into AI “answers” today, every time and in every question, I find it referring not to primary or reputable secondary sources, but to AI summaries. When you pile garbage on top of garbage you do not get reliable information.

I see this all the time in Google’s AI Overviews. That’s one of the reasons I almost never use Google anymore.

Unfortunately, everyone else is using Google’s made-up answers and not even looking down the page to get a real answer from a true expert, or at least someone with a clue about your question of the day.

I can tell on many subjects when an answer is likely to be accurate. But I don’t have a clue about medical treatments. I wouldn’t trust an AI answer on a serious health problem at all. Nevertheless, I know millions of people do that every day. That’s seriously scary.

Equally worrying is that many of us now turn to AI for companionship. I understand loneliness, but this is no cure; it’s, at best, a sticking plaster.

You see, the web really is written by AI for AI. We’re losing both accuracy and humanity. This is not the web I’d hoped we would end up with. I fear there’s no way we can reverse this trend. We’d rather have easy, fast answers and artificial companionship than the real things. That’s profoundly sad.

Pass the cheese. ®

Ruark Audio is turning 40, and rather than celebrate with a badge slapped on a press release and a commemorative mug no one asked for, the British manufacturer has introduced the R410 Anniversary Edition, a limited production version of its all in one music system finished in White Oak veneer with an ebonised grille and ebony veneer inlay.

Only 500 systems will be produced worldwide, each carrying an anniversary badge. The system is listed at £1,399, with wider European pricing reported at €1,599, and Ruark says the Anniversary Edition is due for release in August. Fidelity Imports has not yet confirmed U.S. pricing, but we will update this story when that information becomes available.

That makes this less of a new platform and more of a carefully dressed version of a product Ruark already understands rather well. The R410 remains part of the company’s 100 Series, sitting alongside the R610 Music Console, R710 CD Hi-Fi Console, and R810 Radiogram. The difference is that the R410 keeps the entire system in one cabinet: streamer, amplifier, DAC, phono input, radio, HDMI ARC/eARC, speakers, display, and physical controls. No speaker matching. No rack. No cable spaghetti slowly turning your living room into a failed Maplin or Crazy Eddie’s demonstration.

The Anniversary Edition’s biggest visual change is the cabinet. Ruark has moved from the standard R410 finishes to a White Oak veneer cabinet, paired with an ebonised grille and ebony veneer inlay. That contrast matters. The regular R410 already leaned into mid century modern cues, but this version looks more deliberate and less like another lifestyle audio box trying to win a design award by being beige and harmless.

The matching limited edition R-CD100 CD player, finished in ebonised casework, will also be available alongside it. That is the right move for anyone with shelves full of discs they actually intend to play. Having already reviewed the R-CD100 CD transport, it is also a logical add-on for any compatible Ruark system.

Related Reviews:

Connectivity Galore? 

Ruark’s pitch is clear: one box that can handle streaming, radio, vinyl, TV audio, local files, Bluetooth, and optional CD playback. The R410 Anniversary Edition supports Apple AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, and Qobuz Connect. It also includes Internet Radio, FM with RDS, UPnP/DLNA media server support, Bluetooth 5.1 with aptX HD, AAC, and SBC, plus Wi-Fi networking listed as 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax.

DAB/DAB+ support is also included, although that matters far more in the U.K., Europe, Australia, and other active DAB markets than it does in North America, where HD Radio remains the relevant terrestrial digital radio format.

The wired side is not an afterthought either. There is HDMI ARC/eARC for TV audio, an optical input up to 24-bit/96kHz PCM, stereo RCA line input, a moving magnet phono input with adjustable gain, Ethernet, USB-C file playback and charging, and a mono RCA subwoofer output.

That is the reason the R410 is more interesting than most wireless speakers. It acknowledges that people still own televisions, turntables, CD collections, NAS libraries, and occasionally brains. Unless you live in Maine at the moment and still think Platner was a viable candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Inside, the R410 Anniversary Edition uses a fully active 120 watt Class D amplifier, twin bass reflex cabinet architecture, two 100mm Ruark NS+ bass mid woofers, and two 20mm silk dome tweeters. Ruark also specifies Burr-Brown 32-bit/192kHz DAC and ADC stages, adjustable bass and treble, and switchable Stereo+. Hi-res file support goes up to 32-bit/192kHz for FLAC, AIFF, ALAC, and WAV. MP3 is supported up to 48kHz/320kbps, while AAC is supported up to 96kHz/320kbps. 

The display and control system are part of the appeal. The R410 uses a 4-inch colour TFT display with auto dimming and Ruark’s familiar RotoDial control, supported by a rechargeable wireless remote. That sounds like a small thing until you have spent ten minutes inside a rival app wondering why changing inputs now feels like filing a planning application with the Long Branch council. Ruark’s best products work because they remain physical, tactile, and understandable. The company has figured out that convenience should not mean surrendering every useful control to a phone.

We have spent a fair bit of time with Ruark over the past two years, and the appeal has become clearer with each product. The company is not chasing the usual wireless-speaker race to the bottom, nor is it pretending that every listener wants a rack full of separates. 

The R410 Anniversary Edition lands in the middle of that strategy. It is not as ambitious as the R810. It is not as flexible as the R610 or R710 if you want to choose your own loudspeakers. But it may be the cleanest expression of what Ruark is trying to do for listeners who want better sound without turning their living room into a dealer demo room. It is for someone who wants one system, proper source flexibility, attractive industrial design, and enough sonic ambition to make a Sonos or soundbar solution feel rather underdressed.

Key Specifications:

• Model: Ruark R410 Anniversary Edition
• Finish: White Oak veneer cabinet with ebonised grille and ebony veneer inlay
• Production: Limited to 500 systems worldwide
• Price: £1,399; reported European price €1,599
• Availability: Due August
• System type: All in one active music system
• Amplification: Fully active Class D, 120W total
• Speaker drivers: 2 × 20mm Ruark silk dome tweeters; 2 × 100mm Ruark NS+ bass mid woofers
• Cabinet: Twin bass reflex
• Frequency response: 40Hz to 22kHz, typical in room
• DAC: Burr-Brown 32-bit/192kHz
• ADC: Burr-Brown 32-bit/192kHz
• Tone controls: Adjustable bass and treble, ±6dB
• Sound processing: Switchable Stereo+
• Display: 4-inch colour TFT with auto dimming
• Controls: RotoDial, rechargeable wireless remote, 20 global presets
• Streaming: Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Qobuz Connect
• Wireless platforms: Apple AirPlay 2, Google Cast
• Bluetooth: Version 5.1 with aptX HD, SBC, AAC
• Network playback: UPnP/DLNA media server compatible
• Wi-Fi: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax
• Ethernet: RJ45, 10/100 Mbps
• Radio: Internet Radio, DAB/DAB+, FM with RDS
• HDMI: ARC and eARC
• Optical input: Up to 24-bit/96kHz PCM
• Line input: Stereo RCA, up to 2.3Vrms
• Turntable input: RCA moving magnet phono stage with adjustable gain, 2 to 7mV
• Subwoofer output: Mono RCA, 2.0Vrms
• USB-C: File playback and 5V/5W charging
• Hi-res file support: FLAC, AIFF, ALAC, WAV up to 32-bit/192kHz
• Compressed file support: MP3 up to 48kHz/320kbps; AAC up to 96kHz/320kbps
• Dimensions: 132 × 560 × 290mm cabinet; 150 × 560 × 325mm maximum including feet, controls, and cables
• Weight: 9.5kg
• Power consumption: 2W standby, 8W typical
• Included: R410, 2m AC power cable, quick start guide, telescopic aerial and spanner, rechargeable wireless remote

The Bottom Line

The Ruark R410 Anniversary Edition is not trying to reinvent the R410, and that is probably wise. The core system already made sense: serious streaming support, a real phono input, HDMI ARC/eARC, radio, optional CD playback, useful physical controls, and a cabinet that does not look like it escaped from a router factory.

What makes this version different is the execution. The White Oak veneer, ebonised grille, ebony inlay, anniversary badge, and 500 unit production run push it closer to collectible territory without turning it into a ridiculous luxury object. For listeners who want a handsome all in one system that handles modern streaming, vinyl, TV audio, radio, and CDs without demanding a full rack, this is Ruark making a very clear argument.

For more information: ruarkaudio.com

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Enterprise AI teams are giving agents more freedom at the same moment their confidence in automated testing is collapsing.

Half of enterprises have deployed an AI agent or LLM feature that passed internal evaluations and yet still caused a customer-facing failure — one in four more than once — according to the June 2026 VB Pulse survey of 157 qualified enterprise respondents at companies with 100 or more employees.

The sample is self-selected rather than a probability sample, so the findings should be read as directional, not precise.

But enterprises are not responding by slowing automation: 66% of respondents already permit some production deployment without human review or are building systems intended to do so within the next 12 months. Only 5% say they fully trust the automated evaluations that would make those release decisions.

That mismatch is the evaluation gap: the autonomy ceiling is rising faster than the assurance beneath it. 

It also fits a broader thesis that will be explored at VB Transform 2026: enterprises ship agents first, while the control layers around identity, evaluation, cost, context and orchestration are arriving later. The next year will be a retrofit cycle, with buyers shifting budget toward the systems that make agentic deployments governable and dependable.

Why a passing evaluation is not a working agent

Traditional software testing usually asks whether a defined input produces an expected output. Agent testing is harder because the system may choose its own sequence of steps, call tools, retrieve data, alter state and respond differently from one run to the next.

An agent can make several individually plausible decisions and still reach the wrong result. It may retrieve the correct account but update the wrong field. It may draft a valid refund request but send it without approval. It may call five tools successfully before a sixth step leaks sensitive information or leaves a workflow incomplete.

The survey shows enterprises already recognize this limitation. The most common reason for distrusting automated evaluation is poor alignment with real-world outcomes, cited by 29% of respondents. Bias or inconsistency follows at 21%, lack of explainability at 18%, and data leakage or privacy concerns at 17%.

That hierarchy matters. Enterprises are saying the score often does not predict what happens when a customer, employee or business process encounters the agent in production — not that automated scoring is too slow or expensive.

NIST makes a similar point in its Generative AI Profile: measurements gathered in controlled environments may not transfer cleanly to deployment because behavior changes with prompts, users, context and operating conditions. Its guidance calls for field testing, post-deployment monitoring and clear processes for escalating failures.

Capability is not consistency

A single successful run proves that an agent can complete a task. It does not prove that it will complete the task reliably.

Anthropic’s guidance on agent evaluation distinguishes between measuring whether a system succeeds at least once across repeated attempts and whether it succeeds every time. That distinction is essential for customer-facing or operational workflows. A model that occasionally produces an excellent answer may still be unacceptable if the same task fails unpredictably on the next attempt.

Enterprise teams should therefore treat repeatability as a first-class metric. That means running the same scenario multiple times, varying phrasing and context, testing tool failures, and measuring whether the final business outcome remains correct even when the route changes.

The evaluation set also has to evolve. Every production incident should become a permanent regression test. Customer escalations, failed tool calls, incorrect approvals and data-handling mistakes should feed back into the pre-deployment suite rather than remaining isolated support cases.

Autonomy should expand by risk, not by ambition

The survey does not imply that every agent action should require a person. Human review cannot scale across millions of low-consequence decisions.

But zero-human operation should be earned by demonstrated reliability and bounded by the consequences of failure.

Low-risk actions such as drafting internal summaries or categorizing documents can tolerate broader autonomy. Financial transactions, customer communications, code deployment, access-control changes and data deletion need stricter thresholds, repeated consistency tests, policy checks, rollback mechanisms and clear human escalation paths.

The risk isn’t evenly distributed by company size, either. Larger enterprises — those with 2,500 or more employees — are moving toward zero-human deployment fastest, at 70% versus 64% for smaller companies, and they’re also shipping more agents that go on to fail a customer, at 54% versus 48%. 

That is the warning for enterprise leaders. Removing the human from the loop does not remove uncertainty. Without stronger assurance, it converts uncertainty into an automated production decision.

The market will keep pushing toward greater autonomy because the economic incentive is real. The organizations best positioned won’t be those that remove people fastest — they’ll be the ones that treat repeatability and regression testing as seriously as deployment speed.