Meta Platforms’ latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant’s auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta’s accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a “critical audit matter.” This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make.

Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn’t the “primary beneficiary” of this entity and so didn’t have to put the venture’s assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet.

Meta’s assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta’s decisions and know-how. In its report, EY said auditing Meta’s decision “was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE’s economic performance.”

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After warnings from lawmakers last year, WhatsApp has been blocked in Russia for as many as 100 million users, the Financial Times reported. Russian authorities removed the app from an online directory, effectively wiping it from Russia’s internet. The government has previously said that it wants users to switch to an app called Max, an unencrypted WeChat clone. 

“Today the Russian government has attempted to fully block WhatsApp in an effort to drive users to a state-owned surveillance app,” Meta told the FT in a statement. “Trying to isolate over 100 million people from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia.”

The Russian government deleted WhatsApp rival Telegram yesterday, while also erasing Meta apps Facebook and Instagram. YouTube access was also reportedly degraded, though it’s not clear if the app has been completely removed. 

In July 2025, a Russian lawmaker who regulates the IT industry said it’s very likely that WhatsApp would be placed on a list of restricted software. Parent Meta has been designated as an extremist organization in Russia, and last year Vladimir Putin issued a directive for the nation to further restrict communication apps originating from “unfriendly countries” that have sanctioned Russia. 

The state has said that an in-house app would protect citizens from fraud and terrorism, given the large number of scammers on WhatsApp in the nation. However, restrictions on Telegram haven’t gone over well domestically, even among Putin’s allies, as residents along Ukraine’s borders have relied on it for drone and missile alerts. “I am concerned that slowing Telegram could affect the flow of information, if the situation deteriorates,” said the governor of one of those regions.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/whatsapp-is-now-fully-blocked-in-russia-110953485.html?src=rss

Apple’s in-house studio will be producing the future seasons of Severance, according to Deadline. The company has reportedly acquired the show’s IP and all rights from its original studio, Fifth Season, back in December in a deal that was worth approximately $70 million. Fifth Season will remain as an executive producer, but Apple Studios will now be in charge of the show. Severance will be one of Apple’s marquee titles, alongside other shows like Owen Wilson’s Stick and Kristen Wiig’s Palm Royale. Apple also previously acquired sci-fi dystopian series Silo after its first season.

Deadline reports that the show’s production costs were going beyond what Fifth Season could afford. The studio had already asked Apple for advances in the past and was considering moving the production from New York to Canada for bigger tax rebates. Apple has also apparently been helping Fifth Season not just with its budget, but also with securing advertisers.

Seeing as the second season of Severance became the streamer’s most watched series, and Apple definitely has the money to keep the show going, the company decided to take over the series completely. It will allow Severance’s production to stay in New York without having to worry about budget constraints. Deadline says the series is expected to have four seasons, with the spinoffs showrunner Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller are open to now being in the realm of possibility.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/apple-acquires-severance-and-will-produce-future-seasons-in-house-092405747.html?src=rss

Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris’s hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers — including the Russian government — could have used them to access “millions of computers and devices around the world.”

Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales between 2022 and 2025. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday ahead of his anticipated February 24 sentencing in a Washington, D.C., federal court, the Justice Department asked the judge for nine years in prison, $35 million in restitution, and a maximum fine of $250,000.

Prosecutors described the unnamed Russian buyer — believed to be Operation Zero, which publicly claims to sell only to the Russian government — as “one of the world’s most nefarious exploit brokers.” Williams chose it because, by his own admission, “he knew they paid the most.” He also oversaw the wrongful firing of a subordinate who was blamed for the theft.

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Apple’s long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri — first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 — struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and sometimes falls back on OpenAI’s ChatGPT instead of Apple’s own technology, the report said. Apple has instructed engineers to begin testing new Siri capabilities on iOS 26.5 instead, due in May, and internal builds of that update include a settings toggle labeled “preview” for the personal data features. A more ambitious chatbot-style Siri code-named Campo, powered by Google servers and a custom Gemini model, is in development for iOS 27 in September.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the “world is in peril” in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team “constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most,” citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks.

Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firms, citing concerns about catastrophic risks.

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Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is accustomed to getting makeovers. It got another one Wednesday with the removal of the Crew Access Arm used by astronauts to board their rides to space.

Construction workers first carved the footprint for the launch pad from the Florida wetlands more than 60 years ago. NASA used the site to launch Saturn V rockets dispatching astronauts to the Moon, then converted the pad for the Space Shuttle program. The last shuttle flight lifted off from Pad 39A in 2011, and the agency leased the site to SpaceX for use as the departure point for the company’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

SpaceX started launching from Pad 39A in 2017, then installed a new Crew Access Arm on the pad’s tower the following year, replacing the aging shuttle-era arm that connected to the hatches of NASA’s orbiters. SpaceX added the new arm ahead of the first test flight of the company’s human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2019. Astronauts started using the pathway, suspended more than 200 feet above the pad surface, beginning with the first crew flight on a Dragon spacecraft in 2020.

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Ring’s Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted “Search Party,” a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network.

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who left in 2023 and returned last year, has since moved to re-establish police partnerships and push more AI into Ring cameras. The company has also partnered with Flock, a surveillance firm used by thousands of police departments, and launched a beta feature called “Familiar Faces” that identifies known people at your door. Chris Gilliard, author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, called the ad “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement.”

Further reading: No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring’s Surveillance Nightmare, EFF Says

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On Wednesday, a fossil-fuel lobbying group called the Washington Coal Club awarded President Trump a trophy that named him the “Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal.” Trump took advantage of the opportunity to take his latest shot at reviving the fortunes of the US’s most polluting source of electricity: an executive order that would make the military buy it.

Coal is the second most expensive source of power for the US grid, eclipsed by gas, wind, solar, hydro—everything other than nuclear power. It also produces the most pollution, including particulates that damage human lungs, chemicals that contribute to acid rain, and coal ash that contains many toxic metals. It also emits the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced. Prior to Trump’s return to office, the US grid had been rapidly moving away from its use, including during his first term.

Despite the long-standing Republican claims to support free markets, the second Trump administration has determined that the only way to keep coal viable is direct government intervention. Its initial attempts involved declaring an energy emergency and then using that to justify forcing coal plants slated for closure to continue operations. The emergency declaration relied on what appears to be a tenuous interpretation of the Federal Power Act, and the administration was already facing a lawsuit challenging these actions.

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Blizzard announced today that it is introducing the Warlock as a playable character to Diablo II: Resurrected. It brings the first new class in 25 years to this remaster of the original RPG. It’s part of the Reign of the Warlock DLC, which is available today and will run you $25. It also includes some other updates to the base game, including new items and a new pinnacle boss encounter against the Colossal Ancients. For those players who don’t already own the base game, you can also pick up the Infernal Edition of D2R for $40, which includes the new content.

When D2R launched in 2021, it was an impressively faithful recreation of the game that so many Blizzard fans continued to adore over the years. Bringing in a whole new player class is a big win for those players who have stuck with the game in its contemporary era.

If D2R isn’t your jam, though, Warlock is also being added to both Diablo 4 in its upcoming Lord of Hatred expansion this April and to Diablo Immortal. So aside from Diablo 3 not getting much love, just about all fans of the franchise will have a chance to get into the demon-summoning groove. Blizzard’s 30th anniversary showcase video has all the details about what the other Diablo titles have in store during this year.

Blizzard has been keeping the news and updates rolling over the past few weeks in honor of the company’s 35th anniversary. One of the more notable updates came for team hero shooter Overwatch, which lost the 2 in its name, but gained five more heroes in its big update yesterday.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/diablo-ii-resurrected-is-adding-warlock-as-a-brand-new-player-class-000130003.html?src=rss