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 Apple today seeded the third betas of upcoming iOS 26.3, iPadOS 26.3, tvOS 26.3, and watchOS 26.3 updates to public beta testers, with the updates coming a day after Apple provided the third beta to developers.
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 Google today announced that it is expanding its more affordable Google AI Plus subscription plan to 35 countries and territories, including the United States.
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PC Timer .NET Edition is a portable tool that allows scheduled PC shutdown operations from an efficient interface. You can set your machine to shut down, sign out, restart, and lock at user-defined times without having to use the command line. [License: Freeware | Requires:
11|10|8|7 | Size: 4 MB ]
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The French government is saying au revoir to Microsoft Teams and Zoom as it embraces a home-grown alternative. By next year, civil servants across all departments will have switched to French videoconference platform Visio, as EuroNews reports.
As with Teams and Zoom, Visio has an AI-powered transcription tool. Visio runs on a French company's cloud infrastructure as well. The platform has around 40,000 users and it's been in testing for the last year. The government expects the switch to help reduce costs by as much as €1 million ($1.2 million) each year for every 100,000 users.
The decision to ditch Microsoft Teams and Zoom is part of a broader effort to rely less on foreign software services — particularly US ones. Under the Suite Numérique project, France also plans to jettison the likes of Gmail and Slack for government use.
"The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool," David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform, said. "This strategy highlights France's commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or ser
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Here's a use of AI that appears to do more good than harm. A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) developed a neural network that searches through space images for anomalies. The results were far beyond what human experts could have done. In two and a half days, it sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts, discovering 1,400 anomalous objects.
The creators of the AI model, David O'Ryan and Pablo Gómez, call it AnomalyMatch. The pair trained it on (and applied it to) the Hubble Legacy Archive, which houses tens of thousands of datasets from Hubble's 35-year history. "While trained scientists excel at spotting cosmic anomalies, there's simply too much Hubble data for experts to sort through at the necessary level of fine detail by hand," the ESA wrote in its press release.
After less than three days of scanning, AnomalyMatch returned a list of likely anomalies. It still requires human eyes at the end: Gómez and O'Ryan reviewed the candidates to confirm which were truly abnormal. Among the 1,400 anomalous objects the pair confirmed, more than 800 were previously undocumented.
Most of the results showed galaxies merging or interacting, which can lead to odd shapes or long tails of stars and gas. Others were gravitational lenses. (That's where the gravity of a foreground galaxy bends spacetime so that the light from a background galaxy is warped into a circle or arc.) Other discoveries included planet-forming disks viewed edge-on, galaxies with huge clumps of stars and jellyfish galaxies. Adding a bit of mystery, there were even "several dozen objects that defied classification altogether."
"This is a fantastic
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Google AI Plus, the company's most affordable AI subscription plan, is now rolling out in the US. It will cost you $8 a month for its features, though you can get it for $4 a month for the first two months for a limited time only. AI Plus gives you access to 200GB of storage, as well as access to the Gemini 3 Pro model, Deep Research and Nano Banana Pro inside the Gemini app. Nano Banana Pro generates images that look so realistic, they're nearly indistinguishable from ordinary photos snapped on phones. Google even had to limit its usage due to high demand.
A subscription to AI Plus also expands your access to Google's AI filmmaking tool Flow, its image-to-video creator tool Whisk and its research assistant tool NotebookLM. In addition to the US, the plan is now making its way to 34 more countries, making it available in all regions where Google is selling its AI services. In the US, the new option costs less than half of a $20 AI Pro subscription, which comes with 2TB of storage and access to more tools like code assist. Google's most expensive AI plan, the AI Ultra, costs a whopping $250 a month and comes with 30TB of storage, along with all the AI tools the company can offer. Take note that if you're paying for a Google One Premium 2TB subscription, you'll also get all of AI Plus' features over the next few days.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.
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OpenAI quietly launches ChatGPT Translate, a standalone AI translation tool focused on tone and context, signaling a potential challenge to Google Translate.
The post OpenAI Quietly Rolls Out ChatGPT Translate to Take on Google appeared first on eWEEK.
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