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New Zealand's government has announced it will cut roughly nine thousand public sector jobs — about fourteen percent of its workforce — citing artificial intelligence as a core driver. Finance Minister Nicola Willis framed AI adoption as a basic expectation going forward. It's a candid admission of what many governments are quietly planning but rarely say out loud.
On the security front, Microsoft has dismantled a criminal operation called Scattered Spider — a malware signing-as-a-service ring that sold legitimate-looking code certificates to ransomware gangs. The scheme helped criminals disguise malicious software as trusted applications, infecting thousands of machines including, notably, at least a dozen of Microsoft's own. The takedown involved seizing websites and shutting down hundreds of virtual machines.
And in a quieter corner of the tech world, a new research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research is asking whether the commercial space revolution has actually delivered on its innovation promise. The study weighs the old aerospace establishment against the new generation of private players, and the answer, it turns out, is more complicated than the hype suggests.
That's the pulse of the day. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
