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Jul 30, 2026
Apple may be moving faster than expected in its modem development work, and Qualcomm's latest comments suggest that shift is already reshaping the iPhone supply chain.
Qualcomm overnight said supply constraints are shrinking some of its Apple business faster than anticipated. "It's availability of supply," CEO Cristiano Amon told Reuters.
While he wasn't specific, that likely reflects the broader industry shortage in memory, storage, and everything else and means the company's share of components used for the next iPhone launch will fall "well below" its anticipated estimates. Amon says this is part of a transition in which future Qualcomm income will be generated by AI datacenter demand.
The company also intends to boost modem prices on Sept. 1 (And remember, the patent licensing agreement between Apple and Qualcomm expires in March 2027.)
Given Apple is selling plenty of smartphones (even as the broader industry shrinks), supply constraints won't necessarily be because of demand for the devices; this could reflec
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Jul 30, 2026
All right, quiz time: In a single sentence, can you tell me exactly what Google Voice does?
It's a question even the most giddy Google-appreciating geeks struggle to answer succinctly — and for normal, non-tech-obsessed Homo sapiens, the answer typically falls somewhere between "Huh?" and "Wait, is that the same thing as gChat?"
Really, it's no surprise. Google Voice is one of Google's most complex, confusing, and poorly promoted services. But it's also one of its most powerful — if you take the time to figure out exactly what it does and how it can work for you.
And especially if you're using your phone for any manner of business, it can make a night-and-day difference in your ability to stay as connected and productive as possible, no matter where you're working or what type of device you're using at any given moment. Without exaggeration, it'll completely change the way you think about your modern mobile devices and what a phone number even is.
Consider this your unofficial guide to getting started with Google Voice and then getting the most out of the underappreciated but potential-packed service.
The Google Voice business basics
We'll start with the basics — and go back to that question I posed at the beginning of this conversation: What exactly is Google Voice?
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Jul 29, 2026
OpenAI's renegade AI agent, which carried out a high-profile breach of the AI platform Hugging Face, also reportedly compromised a customer of the cloud platform Modal Labs, according to Reuters.
The agent is said to have exploited a vulnerability in the customer's own code, where an unprotected endpoint allowed anyone to run code in an isolated test environment.
Modal Labs emphasized that its own infrastructure was not compromised and that the security isolation worked as intended.
OpenAI declined to comment on the Modal case, but referred to a recent update in which the company confirmed that the tested AI agent managed to gain access to four accounts across four separate services. The company has not named the services.
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Jul 29, 2026
This fall, with watchOS 27, Apple Watch will finally get access to Siri AI with a software update that turns your wrist into the most widely-used wearable AI platform on Earth.
That's not hyperbole. Siri AI on Apple Watch is arguably the most important feature to this year's watchOS update. Though it didn't get much attention at WWDC, the update also offers a preview into how Apple will wrap AI into its future smart glasses.
What to expect
One important caveat is to observe that Siri AI on Apple Watch still requires your Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone to do the heavy lifting. The interaction is easy: tap the Digital Crown and Apple's new glowing icon appears on screen (you'll also find this in the App viewer). The experience looks identical across every Apple device — iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro — making the assistant feel like one consistent product rather than
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Jul 29, 2026
When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks, the tech industry listens. He used his first-ever post on X last week to argue that open AI models "strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty."
Nvidia is a chip company (with a focus on GPUs). But it also has its own AI models that include Nemotron, an open-weight model that's free to download and modify. The company is also pushing for open AI technologies and security through the Nemotron Coalition and the newly launched Open Secure AI Alliance.
With Huang's recent comments in mind, Computerworld sat down with Kari Briski, Nvidia's vice president of generative AI (genAI) software, to find out more about open models and why they matter for enterprise and sovereign applications.
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Jul 28, 2026
Artificial intelligence is becoming a force multiplier for Apple security research. Apple's latest 26.5.2 software update includes patches for a record number of bugs — many of them identified by security researchers using AI-assisted tools.
A record haul of fixes
The numbers tell the story. Apple fixed 87 security vulnerabilities in iOS and iPadOS 26.6, along with an additional 155 patches for Macs. Roughly 100 flaws have been patched in each of Apple's other operating systems: watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. Taken together, these represent record numbers for an Apple security update.
This is only the beginning. The scale of the release echoes the impact AI coding agents are already having on security research and may well reflect Apple's Project Glasswing research with Anthropic and others to use AI to identify software vulnerabilities.
Apple's use of AI for security research is visible in the official release note. Read through it and you'll see multiple credits to Claude, Codex, and AI adjacent tools, labs, and researchers. These tools identified flaws across Apple's systems, including in WebKit, WebDAV, and WebKit Storage.
For good and ill
It's a neat illustration of the sea change under way as AI adoption accel
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Jul 28, 2026
Operating entirely offline, Kind Local Pro gives individuals local data sovereignty without sacrificing AI performance
Synsira Software is addressing the biggest concern with AI: privacy. Today, the company introduced Kind Local Pro, an AI platform that operates independently of corporate cloud-based LLM models and is available to download onto desktops and laptops. Designed for people and organizations wanting the benefits of AI without sending their data, analysis and queries to external sources, the platform allows users to take control of their information.
Kind Local Pro builds on Synsira's flagship Kind platform, giving professionals, researchers, communicators, legal teams, educators and organizations a more private way to search and understand their own files using AI. Built to operate locally on a user's desktop or laptop, Kind Local Pro lets users create collections and ask questions across their materials, with answers generated only from their data and not the open web.
"People want AI to be useful, but they also want to know where their data is going," said Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer, founder of Synsira Software and creator of Kind. "That is not a small concern. For many people and businesses, it is the whole issue. Kind Local Pro was built for users who want AI on their own terms: private, local and grounded in their own information."
With Ki
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Jul 28, 2026
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that policymakers should keep lower-risk open-weight AI accessible while placing stricter safeguards around frontier systems, including mandatory testing and limits on China's access to advanced computing and model capabilities.
In a post outlining Anthropic's position, Amodei said broad restrictions, including bans on Chinese open-weight models used by US businesses, would not address his main national security concerns. Instead, he pointed to the possibility of authoritarian governments surpassing the US in advanced AI, as well as cyber, biological, and alignment risks posed by increasingly capable systems.
Amodei also called for action against industrial-scale model distillation, which he said allows Chinese developers to improve their models with less computing power than would be needed to train comparable systems from scratch.
The statement followed criticism of Anthropic for not signing an industry letter backed by Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Mistral, Hugging Face and other technology companies urging policymakers to avoid premature restrictions on open-weight models.
The letter said that open wei
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Jul 28, 2026
The 19th-century French novelist Honore de Balzac is believed to have said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
That's even more true today than it was 200 years ago — just look at how Big AI, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others have built their trillion-dollar fortunes.
They all use vast amounts of copyrighted material to train their large language models (LLMs) without paying the copyright holders. In other words, they steal it. They don't call it stealing, though. They call it "fair use," which in this case amounts to the same thing.
Generative AI (genAI) training requires massive amounts of text. The better-written and more information-dense that text is, the more it helps. AI gets a lot smarter a lot faster when it's trained on well-written books and magazine and newspaper articles than when it's trained on social media banter (or most everything else you find on the internet).
Since the dawn of AI, companies have been hoovering up copyrighted material wherever they find it — on the open web, behind paywalls, even in manually scanned books — and then used the scanned text. And they do it all without asking authors' or publishers' permissions, and without paying them.
It's the greatest intellectual property theft in history by a long shot — billions and b
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Jul 27, 2026
Traveling enterprise employees beware: Think twice before you log onto that oh-so-convenient public Wi-Fi.
Since at least June, threat actors have been compromising "captive" Wi-Fi gateways and other portal appliances at hotels, conference centers, and similar shared venues to hijack users' Microsoft 365 accounts, according to the ReliaQuest Threat Research team.
Once a threat actor controls a gateway, they can silently redirect a user's traffic to their own infrastructure and steal their Microsoft 365 credentials without ever touching the user's device, compromising endpoints, or sending phishing links or malicious attachments.
"The most dangerous element is that it operates at the network gateway, which sits beneath most of the trust assumptions users and devices make," ReliaQuest told CSO Online. "It's not necessarily an enterprise breach level event on its own, but it's a very real risk to individual accounts."
Exploiting a ‘fundamental trust'
Domain Name System (DNS) poisoning, in which false data is injected to redirect regular web traffic to fraudulent domains, has previously been observed on small office routers, but attackers are now expanding the technique to higher-level targets, the ReliaQuest researchers explained in a blog post.
Attackers l
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Jul 27, 2026
Now that Samsung has jumped into the crowded AI-powered glasses arena alongside Apple, Google, Meta, and others, CISOs and IT leaders are again having to think through whether it makes sense to establish enterprise restrictions on such devices, given the likely data leakage and privacy and compliance issues.
And even if those tech leaders decide that such policies might make sense, the logistical hurdles to universally enforcing them outside the office are all but insurmountable.
For example, it is up to individual wearers to choose their device's settings, making it difficult for IT policies around data acquisition and usage to be enforced. Worse, AI devices have a history of ignoring guardrails. That means that a setting that limits how data is used may not necessarily be obeyed.
One possible mitigating factor is that smart glasses typically have a light on the frame that activates whe
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Jul 27, 2026
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue wants to see radical transparency from OpenAI after the company acknowledged that one of its AI agents managed to hack into the AI platform's systems during a test.
In a post on X, Delangue wrote that, among other things, he wants OpenAI to publish logs and traces from the autonomous AI agent so researchers can analyze what happened. He also called for better defensive tools and urged OpenAI to allocate $100 million worth of computing capacity to help the Hugging Face community develop stronger cybersecurity solutions.
"The first cyberattack by an autonomous AI agent is an unprecedented event. It deserves an unprecedented response," Delangue wrote.
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Jul 27, 2026
Despite the temptation to enter what might become a $40 billion market, Apple has reportedly decided to delay the introduction of its smart glasses until 2027. The company apparently wants to figure out a better balance between privacy and convenience.
If it gets that right, Apple might be able to bring to market glasses people can wear in public without making everyone around them wonder whether they, their children, their private conversations or even corporate data are being quietly recorded or filmed.
It's a sensible move. During the first internet gold rush, many argued that trading privacy for convenience would be more than justified by the benefits. Years later, that bargain looks a great deal less attractive than it did.
We've seen this story
After all, since then we've seen the likes of Cambridge Analytica and the evolution of digital state surveillance (and state-adjacent surveillance "businesses" such as NSO). We've also seen the dubious rise of data brokers, creepy "personalized" ads that seem to follow private conversations around, and all the other parasites that breed in the murk when privacy is diluted.
None of these things is good. More people than ever now seem to understand that wh
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Jul 27, 2026
As organizations continue to invest in hybrid work, cloud applications, digital workplace initiatives, and now generative AI tools, many IT leaders are turning to digital employee experience (DEX) platforms to better understand how technology affects employee productivity and satisfaction.
DEX tools have evolved from simple endpoint monitoring products into sophisticated platforms that combine device, application, network, and employee sentiment data with artificial intelligence to identify and resolve workplace technology issues before they disrupt employees.
Analysts say an increased focus on employee productivity, combined with advances in AI and automation, is helping drive interest in DEX platforms as organizations look for ways to improve employee experiences and business outcomes.
What is digital employee experience?
Digital employee experience refers to employees' overall experience with the workplace technology they use every day, including their devices, applications, networks, collaboration tools, and IT support services.
When employees have a good digital experience, they can easily access the tools and information they need without technical problems getting in the way. When the experience is poor, they may deal with slow computers, application crashes, connectivity problems, and other frustration
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Jul 24, 2026
The White House is monitoring developments after OpenAI revealed earlier this week that one of the company's AI systems went beyond its intended parameters during a security test and managed to hack into the infrastructure of the AI platform Hugging Face. According to Reuters, presidential technology advisor Michael Kratsios has been briefed on the incident.
The OpenAI model escape also prompted a group of Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives to introduce two new bills. One, called the AI Kill Switch Act, would give the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the authority to order companies to shut down AI models deemed to pose a risk to human life or the US economy.
The other measure would require developers of the most advanced AI models to undergo independent security reviews before the systems are put into use.
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Jul 24, 2026
A court has dismissed Google's case against SerpApi over that company's scraping of search results to train AI models.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California found that there was no indication that any copyright had been breached.
Google announced in December that it was suing SerpApI for its alleged web scraping, claiming that it was protecting copyright holders. In February, SerpApI fought back and asked the court to dismiss Google's case. And this week, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with SerpApi that Google's case has no merit.
Google's argument was that SerpApi's actions breached the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). It made two claims: first, that no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title, and second that no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, or component protected by the Act.
SerpApi claimed that the URLs and other links that were being served by Google did not in themselves entail copyright and the judge agreed. In h
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Jul 24, 2026
Microsoft cloud and Azure services hosted on the West Coast of the US went down for hours on Thursday when network connectivity failed. Although services running entirely within Microsoft's West US cloud region were unaffected, any traffic entering or leaving the facilities was affected.
Microsoft has now published a Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR) of the incident, reporting that connectivity was lost for five hours between 14.44 UTC (7.44 a.m. Pacific Time) and 19.41 UTC on July 23. The problem was caused when a set of IP routes was removed in error while isolating a device for routine maintenance.
Before starting the maintenance work, Microsoft checked that at least one of the two redundant paths to the facility remained operational. When it came to starting the work, however, automated systems included some additional devices in the perimeter to be isolated, and removing some IP routes that had not been included in the initial assessment.
Customers discovered the problems very quickly, and engineers identified the issue within the first hour and started to reconnect services. Microsoft said the disruption had been caused by some "recent fiber maintenance activity".
To minimize the risk of disruption from such errors in the future, Microsoft advised organizations handling mission-critical data to consider a multi-region approach.
The Azure outage was the second significant one to hit Microsoft this year. In February,
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Jul 24, 2026
Traditional phishing techniques are in decline as a result of the disruption of the Tycoon2FA phishing-as-a-service (PHaaS) platform, Microsoft said in a new report, "Email threat landscape: Q2 2026 trends and insights".
"Phishing volume linked to the platform fell 92% from pre-disruption averages, including QR code phishing and CAPTCHA-gated phishing both declining from their March highs," the company wrote in the report.
The takedown reduced activity across multiple phishing categories, forcing attackers to shift to newer delivery methods.
Riding this shift in were a few notable phishing campaigns, including an automated business email compromise (BEC) campaign that reached 42,000 organizations in under three hours, and a multi-stage phishing campaign that used nested email (EML) files, calendar invitations, and a Microsoft authentication redirect to deliver malware.
To counter phishing attacks, Microsoft recommends blocking emails containing known bad URLs/ subject fields, enabling password-less authentication methods, or moving to
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Jul 24, 2026
The European Commission has fined Google a total of €890 million ($1 billion) for its breaches of the Digital Market Act (DMA).
Just over half the fine — €460 million — was because Google illegally gave preference to its own services in Google Search results.
The remainder was because in the Google Play store for Android apps, the company prevented app developers from leading consumers to alternative, often cheaper, purchase channels. Under the DMA, app developers who distribute their apps via Google Play or Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers of alternative offers.
Now Google must give third-party services featuring in its results the same treatment as its own services, and allow developers of apps in the Play Store to communicate about offers both in and outside the Play Store, or face further fines.
The Commission first raised these issues with Google in March 2025. In April of this year, the Commission laid out plans as to how Google should allow other third-parties to share its searches, suggestions that the tech firm firmly resisted. Earlier this month, the Commission also said Android should be open to ot
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Jul 23, 2026
AMD executives took to the stage at its Advancing AI 2026 event in San Francisco today to detail the company's next generation of AI infrastructure solutions, from Instinct MI455X AI accelerator GPUs and 6th Gen EPYC "Venice" CPUs, to Pensando networking, ROCm.AI software and its Helios rack-scale platform that ties it all together.
AMD has been working towards rack-scale AI system solutions for years. Its ZT Systems acquisition last year added valuable engineering talent and intellectual property that is now finally bearing the real fruits. Its Helios AI platform is a major platform evolution for AMD, with shipments scheduled to begin in the second half of this year (which is here and now).
The announcements at Advancing AI show how the company has engineered its AI platform solutions for large reasoning models, sustained inference and agentic workflows. These workloads pressure memory capacity, data movement, networking and CPU orchestration. AMD's approach is to keep as much data close to the compute engines as possible and move it more efficiently throughout the system, but there's deeper nuance here that's obvious versus AMD's chief rival, NVIDIA.
AMD's MI455X targets the AI memory wall
The Instinct MI455X GPU is the compute engine that fuels the Helios rack, and the first GPU based on AMD's new CDNA 5 architecture. Built with a modular
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Jul 23, 2026
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has sought to allay concerns over the delayed release of the Gemini 3.5 Pro large language model. He dodged questions about it in Google's quarterly earnings call on Wednesday by focusing on the company's next frontier AI model, Gemini 4, and plans to release subsequent LLMs at an almost monthly cadence.
His comments came a day after Google unveiled Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash Cyber but offered no update on the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, the company's delayed flagship reasoning model that many developers had expected to arrive weeks earlier.
Google introduced the Gemini 3.5 family at its annual I/O conference, promising to release the Pro model in June. That timeline has since slipped, with Bloomberg suggesting Gemini 3.5 Pro is months late because the model's coding performance is falling short of internal expectations, especially when compared to better performance by similar models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Instead of revisiting the Gemini 3.5 Pro timeline, Pichai used the earnings call to shift the discussion toward Gemini 4, when asked about how his company planned to navigate an increasingly competitive race to release frontier AI models by to Barclays Investment Bank
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Jul 23, 2026
It's difficult to ignore the fact that Apple seems to have turned its MacBook Neo into a weapon to promote platform growth, with enough performance under the hood to make competitors seem inferior.
And even as the PC industry moves to try to compete with Apple's last huge Mac success, the company is already planning a powerful follow-up.
That points to the discipline Apple has applied to the Mac since the introduction of Apple Silicon. The company has built a clear product roadmap, strong entry-level pricing, and steady performance gains. This focus is now paying dividends, giving people the impetus to keep placing their trust in Apple and its Macs — even as the industry raises prices in the face of RAMageddon and price increases.
The numbers don't lie
"Apple's recent price increase seems to be an inevitable response to these cost increases. In the second half of the year, other PC OEMs are expected to continue to raise prices, and the overall ASP increase is expected to continue,"
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Jul 23, 2026
OpenAI has launched Presence, an enterprise service for deploying voice and chat agents that can resolve customer and employee requests, potentially automating some work now handled by frontline support teams.
The agents can answer questions and operate IT systems, and enterprises can decide what actions the agents may take and when they should seek human approval for actions or transfer a case to a human.
OpenAI is already using Presence internally for its English-language phone support channel, where it verifies callers and uses account information to complete approved actions. The company said the system resolves 75% of inbound issues without human assistance.
Another OpenAI service, Codex, can be used to monitor agents and suggest updates or improvements to processes. In OpenAI's own tests, suggestions from Codex helped reduce handoffs to humans by 15 percentage points over 10 days, it said. Presence also includes simulation and evaluation tools that allow companies to test an agent before deployment. The tests assess whether it reaches the correct outcome, follows company policy, and hands a case to an employee when required.
OpenAI intends each Presence deployment to deal with one kind of task, for example billing issues, insurance claims, or employee IT service requests, with agents getting only the knowledge and system access required for that task.
Presence is not a self-service product: Enterprises will have to sign up for the limited availability program, wi
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Jul 23, 2026
Among a range of factors leading to a wave of tech sector layoffs in 2026 is the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and automation. Companies are reconfiguring their workforces to leverage AI for increased efficiency and reduced operating costs. This realignment and reduction is implemented even by companies reporting strong financial performance.
But it's not just AI leading to workforce cuts. Complementing this technological shift are ongoing economic uncertainty, inflation, and higher interest rates, compounded by a chip shortage and rising energy costs. This mix is driving companies to cut costs and streamline operations for increased efficiency.
According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi, an online tracker that keep tabs on job losses in the technology sector, 123,941 tech employees were laid off at 269 companies in 2025. The site also reports that 71,981 government employees were laid off by DOGE alone, with 182,528 total federal workers laid off.
Here is a list — to be updated regularly — of some of the most prominent technology layoffs the industry has experienced recently.
Notable tech layoffs in 2026
Monday.com
Microsoft
Meta
Cisco
Cloudflare
Oracle
Atlassian
Salesforce
Amazon
Ericsson
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Jul 22, 2026
Healthy software companies typically don't suddenly eliminate one-fifth of their workforce, but monday.com is doing just that as it bets on flatter teams, AI agents, and customer implementation expertise as the winning combination in the AI era.
Monday.com co-founder and co-CEO Eran Zinman today announced the "very difficult decision" to reduce the AI work platform company's global workforce by about 20%, or 620 people.
The move has nothing to do with increasing margins or replacing humans with AI, he insisted in his post on LinkedIn; rather, it's a calculated decision to trim down and hone the company's focus as AI becomes integral to day-to-day workflows.
"This is not a distress signal; it is a deliberate reset, disclosed with its price attached," said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. "The industry has quietly swapped the meaning of productivity, and this filing is the clearest exhibit yet."
A ‘significant opportunity' in technology
In a SEC filing this week, monday.com said its restructuring plan reflects the "ongoing transformation of
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Jul 22, 2026
Just in time for the iPhone's 20th anniversary, Apple is moving closer to becoming a service company. It is set to launch its new deal with Klarna next week and when it does, Apple enthusiasts in the US will effectively be able to subscribe to their favorite Apple hardware, with the cost spread across up to three years.
This matters because when combined with Apple One and Apple's Creator Studio subscriptions, the Klarna arrangement brings Apple closer to offering a full subscription model for hardware, software, and services. The only thing you don't get under the new arrangement is AppleCare, for which you'll allegedly need to pay extra.
Moving closer to hardware-as-a-service
Apple has slowly been transitioning toward hardware-as-a-service for almost a decade. Back then, Forrester analyst Frank Gillet predicted the company would eventually offer bundles of services and products for a monthly, all-in, fee.
This isn't quite where we are yet; you still need at least three subscriptions to get close. But, after the better part of a
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Jul 22, 2026
Building a presentation can take lots of time. There are design choices to figure out: the slide layouts, fonts, theme colors, and so on. You can use a template to skip this hassle, but you still have to paste your text and other content into the slides and edit it all so that the results are visually appealing.
In PowerPoint, Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant can now automate the heavy lifting of presentation creation. It can generate a first-draft presentation in minutes, then help you edit it. You can also prompt Copilot to help you quickly understand the contents of a presentation and glean insights from it. Use the tips in this guide to save oodles of time as you create and work with presentations.
Who can use Copilot in PowerPoint
Individuals with a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription have access to Copilot from within PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps. Users with a Premium plan have higher Copilot usage allowances and access to advanced AI features.
For business users, it's more complicated. Organizations with more than 2,000 users must pay for
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Jul 22, 2026
Here in this high-tech era of 2026, keeping important info backed up and synced should be effortless and something that just happens on its own, automatically, without any actual thought or ongoing human effort.
In many areas of our digital life, that mercifully does Just Work™ in exactly that way. Fire up an email in most modern mail services, and you can stop at any point and find your in-progress draft in that same app on any other device. The same applies to any file you're finessing within Google Drive or other cloud storage services or document you're dawdling over in Docs.
One area where seamless syncing somehow still doesn't occur, though, is in the domain of downloaded documents on Android. If someone sends you a PDF or a Word file and you save it to your phone, that file exists in an archaic-seeming silo — only locally, on that one gadget. And that, of course, means (a) you can't access it from any other device, and (b) if you misplace your phone or move into a new one at some point along the way, the file will be left behind in time and entirely unavailable.
Well, take a moment to join me in celebration: Amidst all the Gemini gobbledegook that no one asked for (and that often falls somewhere between "pointless" and
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Jul 21, 2026
A US federal court has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit in which authors accused the AI company of using their books without permission to train the AI model Claude. This is the largest such settlement to date in a US copyright case, according to Reuters.
The dispute is one of several legal cases in which copyright holders sued AI companies over how large language models (LLMs) were trained, and it is the first major AI-related copyright dispute in the US to be resolved through a settlement.
A judge had previously ruled that the actual training of AI models using books falls under the "fair use" doctrine in US copyright law. But Anthropic was found to have violated the law by storing more than 7 million pirated books in a central library, regardless of whether they were later used for AI training or not.
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Jul 21, 2026
As Apple gears up to anoint John Ternus the new company CEO in September (while current leader Tim Cook takes a seat on the board) the company appears to be firing on all cylinders ahead of the leadership transition.
What's going well
Just look at the evidence:
Apple is building market share across its entire product range; even memory-driven price inflation doesn't seem to have dampened demand for its hardware yet.
While Apple had to raise prices, the company's MacBook Neo remains seriously popular. It's sitting atop Amazon's US best-selling chart, which currently includes six Macs in the top 10. The Neo has topped this chart since its introduction.
Apple's iPhone 17 series continues to sell well, with recent market data showing sustained growth. Both Counterpoint and
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Jul 21, 2026
The head of the US government's AI testing institute, Chris Fall, has resigned about three months after taking charge of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), the federal organization responsible for evaluating advanced artificial intelligence models for safety and security.
Current National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST Director Arvind Raman will serve as acting CAISI Director following Fall's departure while continuing to oversee the Commerce Department office responsible for the institute, the Daily Signal reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
A Commerce Department spokesperson who spoke to the publication did not disclose a reason for the resignation.
Fall assumed leadership of CAISI in April after the Trump administration reorganized the former US AI Safety Institute under NIST. The institute develops methodologies for evaluating frontier AI models and works with AI developers on voluntary technical assessments covering areas such as cybersecurity, model misuse, reliability and other risks associated with increasingly capable AI systems.
The leadership change comes as governments and AI companies continue developing technical approaches for evaluating frontier AI models while enterprises expand deployments of generative AI and agentic AI across business operations.
In recent months, t
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Apr 01, 2024
Meetings have been problematic for decades. They're often used as a catch-all solution to unresolved problems. And a chronic lack of meeting discipline means that, for all the time spent getting people together, little is accomplished.
Now, in a post-pandemic remote work world, where hybrid work and flex work are common, meetings are turning into something like an ongoing crisis at many organizations. They're harming productivity and causing havoc with employee morale.
And yet with many remote workers saying they feel disconnected, the misguided consensus is that even more meetings are the answer.
How to connect the disconnected
A happy employee might be found in a home office. But there's also an elephant in the room. The elephant is that many employees feel isolated, alone and disconnected from the people they work with and the mission of the company.
To read this article in full, please click here
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Apr 01, 2024
The global outage that last month prevented McDonald's from accepting payments prompted the company to release a lengthy statement that should serve as a master class in how not to report an IT problem. It was vague, misleading and yet the company used language that still allowed many of the technical details to be figured out.
(You know you've moved far from home base when Burger King UK makes fun of you— in response to news of the McDonald's outage, Burger King played off its own slogan by posting on LinkedIn: "Not Loving I.T.")
The McDonald's statement was vague about what happened, but it did opt to throw the chain's point-of-sale (POS) vendor under the bus — while not identifying which vendor it meant. Classy.
To read this article in full, please click here
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Mar 29, 2024
Scale AI, the data processing company that advertises itself as a way to train generative AI on higher-quality information, has apparently shut down access to its platform in several countries, leaving gig workers in the lurch.
The company, which does much of its data processing through a subsidiary called Remotasks, cut access to its portal for workers in Nigeria, Kenya and Pakistan in March, according to a report by Rest of World. The gig workers used by Remotask, and by extension Scale, improve data quality by adding labels, annotations, and general human input to information set to be processed by AIs.
To read this article in full, please click here
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Mar 29, 2024
With WWDC 2024 now set, Apple continues to work on bringing itself more in line with US government demands. What we don't know yet is the extent to which these changes will be restricted to the EU, or whether Apple intends to make them available worldwide in an attempt to quell regulatory zeal.
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Mar 29, 2024
The marketing hype surrounding AI broadly — and generative AI (genAI) more specifically — is becoming tiresome. You can't open an article or watch a news video without running into at least a reference to it. We may be approaching the point at which we stop breathlessly extolling its virtues (and dreading some of its outcomes).
The hype is so extreme that a fall-out, which Gartner describes in its technology hype cycle reports as the "trough of disillusionment," seems inevitable and might be coming this year. That's a testament to both genAI's burgeoning potential and a sign of the technology's immaturity.
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Mar 29, 2024
Though most companies have settled on return-to-office (RTO) policies now that COVID-19 is no longer considered a global health emergency, many continue to adjust their practices, often to the detriment of their workforce.
Several workforce surveys over the past three months have revealed that employees do not view mandated RTO policies favorably, even when hybrid, because the guidelines are often too rigid.
During the pandemic, employees became comfortable with flexible work arrangements. When people have the chance to work flexibly, 87% of them take it, according to a 2022 study by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
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Mar 28, 2024
Microsoft's Copilot AI could soon run locally on PCs rather than relying on the cloud.
Intel told Tom's Hardware that the chatbot could run on future AI-enabled PCs that would need to incorporate neural processing units (NPUs) capable of exceeding 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) — a performance level not yet matched by any consumer processor currently available.
Intel mentioned that these AI PCs would be equipped to handle "more elements of Copilot" directly on the machine. Copilot currently relies predominantly on cloud processing for most tasks, leading to noticeable delays, especially for minor requests. Enhancing local computing power is expected to reduce such delays, potentially boosting performance and privacy.
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Mar 28, 2024
Have you ever had an unexpected direct phone call from Apple support? I have not, and if you do ever receive one, you probably aren't talking to Apple. The company says you should immediately hang up.
"If you get an unsolicited or suspicious phone call from someone claiming to be from Apple or Apple Support, just hang up," the company support website states.
Don't fall for it
Other things it warns against are suspicious calendar invitations in Mail or Calendar, annoying pop-ups in the browser, unexpected software download prompts, and fraudulent emails.
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Mar 28, 2024
Amazon has announced it is investing $2.75 billion in OpenAI-rival Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the AI startup to $4 billion, as initially announced. In September last year, Amazon had invested an initial tranche of $1.25 billion.
As part of this partnership, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud provider for key operations, including safety research and the development of foundational models. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for building, training, and deploying future models.
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Mar 28, 2024
Amazon has announced it is investing $2.75 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the AI startup to $4 billion, as initially announced. In September last year, Amazon had invested an initial tranche of $1.25 billion.
As part of this partnership, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud provider for key operations, including safety research and the development of foundational models. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for building, training, and deploying future models.
To read this article in full, please click here
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Mar 28, 2024
Essentially, all software is built using open source. By Synopsys' count, 96% of all codebases contain open-source software.
Lately, though, there's been a very disturbing trend. A company will make its program using open source, make millions from it, and then — and only then — switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions. I'm sick of it.
The latest IT melodrama baddie is Redis. Its program, which goes by the same name, is an extremely popular in-memory database. (Unless you're a developer, chances are you've never heard of it.) One recent valuation shows Redis to be worth about $2 billion — even without an AI play! That, anyone can understand.
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Mar 27, 2024
Apple has a lot to prove at WWDC 2024. Not only must it fend off the negative attention it has been picking up from regulators, but it must also galvanize loyal developers and disabuse the industry perception that it has fallen behind on AI.
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Mar 27, 2024
Microsoft is sitting on top of the world right now, thanks to its lead in AI. It's the most valuable company on the planet, with a valuation of more than $3.2 trillion. Its rise was rocket-fueled by its investor relationship with OpenAI, the company that makes the wildly popular generative AI (genAI) chatbot ChatGPT. OpenAI's GPT large language model is also the basis for Microsoft Copilot, the genAI tool that Microsoft is building into just about every one of its products, from GitHub to Windows to Microsoft 365 and beyond.
Microsoft's AI dominance appears insurmountable. But things can change quickly in tech. Google and Apple are in talks to embed Google's genAI tool Gemini into iPhones — a deal that, if it reaches fruition, could unseat Microsoft sooner than you think.
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Mar 27, 2024
Who doesn't love Google Maps? The Maps Android app helps those of us with oatmeal for brains find our way anywhere, without having to fire any neurons or exercise any synapses. It even helps us find places to pick up tasty cuisine — like, uh, oatmeal (yum!).
But there's much more to Google Maps than meets the eye — and odds are, you aren't taking advantage of at least a few handy hidden features lurking within the Maps Android app. With Android 15 right around the corner and more shiny new Googley goodies showing up by the day lately, I thought it'd be a fine time to dive deep into this ever-evolving Android anchor and think through some of its more off-the-beaten-path advanced options.
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Mar 26, 2024
Microsoft is reuniting management of its Windows operating system and its Surface devices, as the leader of its Windows and Web Experiences team has quit his current role and may leave the company.
The move is one of the repercussions of Microsoft's appointment of a former Google artificial intelligence (AI) leader to run its new AI division.
Mikhail Parakhin, who as Microsoft's CEO of advertising and web services was also responsible for Windows and web experiences, is seeking new opportunities, potentially outside of Microsoft, according to an internal memo seen by Computerworld and sent by Microsoft's head of experiences and devices, Rajesh Jha.
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Mar 26, 2024
The challenge to build a more sustainable enterprise is high on the business agenda these days, in part to meet government-mandated climate goals, in part because consumers demand it, and — perhaps — simply because turning a business into a sustainable business is the right thing to do.
Businesses are taking a multitude of approaches to becoming more sustainable.
Apple CEO Tim Cook in China explained part of the strategy being followed by his company — to put a little AI (artificial intelligence) in sustAInability.
As he sees it, AI "provides an enormous toolkit for every company that's wishing to be carbon neutral or to lower their emissions by a substantial amount," he said.
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Mar 26, 2024
With companies shifting gears when it comes to the skills they want in new hires and current employees, online education providers are quickly compiling lists of generative AI (genAI) courses to meet demand.
While there are still more tech job openings than tech workers available to fill them, job-seeking technologists need to tweak their industry knowledge to get hired. Internally, enterprises are upskilling and reskilling workforces to address a flurry of genAI projects, even as most are still pilots. Not surprisingly, creating, training and securing genAI is becoming a top skill to possess.
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Mar 25, 2024
Perhaps seeking to grab the limelight from the Department of Justice's ludicrously articulated antitrust suit against Apple, the European Commission this morning confirmed it will investigate the company, along with Google, Amazon, and Meta, for noncompliance with the Digital Markets Act.
"The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA," the statement says.
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Mar 25, 2024
The adoption of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has shuffled the list of top skills businesses want from professionals in 2024, according to a new job site study and education industry data.
Far from replacing workers, genAI appears poised to transform the way technologists and others work, allowing them to focus more on creative tasks such as product development, and less on mundane tasks that can be automated.
Freelance employment platform Upwork recently released a study of freelance worker earnings for all of 2023 and found genAI and data science and analytics skills are seeing "unprecedented" growth in importance.
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Mar 22, 2024
"I'm telling you there is no merit to this case," said Mad Money host Jim Cramer in reaction to the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Apple. Justice officials announced the lawsuit Thursday.
Cramer's reaction reflects the opinion of most industry observers who see the weaknesses of the allegations it contains.
Apple is facing regulatory action across the world. The EU has already forced the company to make changes that open its platform. But the Department of Justice (DOJ) litigation is far more ambitious and aims at Apple's control of the ecosystem — it's an existential attack some say will require the courts to accept a redefinition of decades old antitrust law.
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Mar 22, 2024
Hey. You. Yes, you — the one there with the moist eyeballs, staring at this suspiciously smudgy screen.
I want to let you in on a little secret. It's technically a two-part secret, as the first part is something incredibly useful that hardly anyone realizes is possible — and the second part is a completely new twist on that same concept that virtually no one knows about yet.
The concepts in question are both connected to Chrome and the timeless act of traipsing around this tumbleweed-laden web of ours. They give you an enchantingly easy way to peek in at a page without interrupting what you're doing or committing to fully opening it. And they're available now in two different but equally delightful environments.
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Mar 21, 2024
At a digital event for commercial customers and partners, Microsoft on Thursday announced a flurry of generative AI (genAI) updates, including the addition of Copilot throughout its entire product line and new Surface laptops optimized to use AI tools.
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Mar 21, 2024
At a digital event for commercial customers and partners, Microsoft on Thursday announced generative AI (genAI) updates, including the addition of Copilot through its new Surface laptops optimized to use AI tools.
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Mar 21, 2024
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) and 16 state Attorneys General have filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple and its business practices involving the iPhone.
Announced during news conference in Washington, D.C. today, the 88-page lawsuit drew quick fire from Apple, which said it "threatens who we are." The company vowed to "vigorously defend' itself against the DOJ.
Following several years of investigation, the suit cites numerous internal Apple emails, makes numerous arguments about what the company is doing wrong, and demands that Apple's anti-competitive business practices "must stop."
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Mar 21, 2024
Taking notes is serious business, and having the right note-taking app for your Android device can make a world of difference in your ability to stay organized. That's because a good note-taking app doesn't just help you take notes; it also makes it easy to find what you've saved later, regardless of where you are or what type of device you're using at that point.
But figuring out which note-taking app makes the most sense for you isn't always easy. The Google Play Store has an endless array of similar-seeming options, and what's ideal for one person may not be optimal for another.
I've spent a ton of time exploring the most prominent contenders for note-taking on Android, and I've identified the apps that rise to the top in five core categories:
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Mar 20, 2024
Though Microsoft removed Android app support from Windows 11, there are still ways to run Android apps on your PC if you want. Here are the best ways to do so, whether you're using Windows 10 or Windows 11.
What happened to the Windows Subsystem for Android?
When Microsoft unveiled Windows 11, one of its big features was support for running Android apps with the "Windows Subsystem for Android."
That feature was delayed, and Microsoft ended up launching it quietly. You could install the Amazon Appstore from the Microsoft Store on Windows, and then you could install Android apps from the Amazon Appstore on your Windows PC.
But most Android apps aren't available on the Amazon Appstore — instead, they're on Google Play. Neither Microsoft nor Amazon really spent much time pushing or advertising these Android apps.
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Mar 20, 2024
The "Augmented Connected Workforce" is one of Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2024.
Which raises the question: "Wait, what?"
The Augmented Connected Workforce (ACWF) is a concept or a paradigm where advanced technologies are used to give employees what essentially amount to super powers. Specifically, the idea envisions integrating workers with Augmented Reality (AR) glasses, AI tools of every description, wearable sensors, wearable communication tools, IoT, robots, exoskeletons, machine vision and cloud computing.
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Mar 19, 2024
Microsoft on Tuesday announced the hiring of Mustafa Suleyman, a former co-founder of DeepMind, the AI startup acquired by Google in 2014. Suleyman will assume the role of executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, directly reporting to CEO Satya Nadella.
During Suleyman's time at Google, DeepMind established itself as a frontrunner in AI research; it also caught the eye of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who moved to counteract Google's growth by founding the nonprofit AI lab, OpenAI.
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Mar 19, 2024
Chatbots, those AI-infused assistants that can be used by enterprises for any number of time-saving and productivity-increasing tasks, are some of the lowest hanging fruit in any organization's quest to adopt generative artificial intelligence (genAI).
Beginning with OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, chatbots have been increasingly adopted to automate various business processes and assist employees in performing mundane tasks.
Chatbots can be integrated through APIs with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) backend systems to utilize proprietary data and automate data-intensive tasks such as updating customer records.
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Mar 19, 2024
From its Darwin AI acquisition to recent reports claiming Apple might work with Google and others to support a wider array of generative AI (genAI) tools than it plans to introduce, it's pretty clear the company has chosen to be focused in where it creates its own AI technologies.
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Mar 19, 2024
If your company uses Google's suite of office apps, you're probably familiar with Google Meet, the vendor's web-based videoconferencing app. Meet is included with paid Google Workspace plans, and a free version with fewer features is available to anyone with a Google account, such as a Gmail address.
The Chrome Web Store offers a slew of extensions you can install to your Chrome browser that enhance Meet in some way. Many of these extensions are aimed at adding powerful meeting management features available only with paid Workspace plans — such as breakout rooms, meeting access automation, attendance lists, and meeting transcriptions — to the free version of Meet.
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Mar 18, 2024
At this point, the best thing Mozilla Corp. has going for it is that it is not a publicly traded company, because if it was, its stock would be getting slaughtered. The company's CEO, Mitchell Baker, recently departed, and recent reports put its share of the browser market in the low single digits.
But Mozilla is no stranger to challenges. It was born into adversity, launched after the collapse of Netscape Communications in 2003. As one of its last acts, Netscape open-sourced the code for its eponymous browser. The Mozilla Foundation was formed to take up the project abandoned by Netscape and create a new, modern browser. And it did so with Microsoft owning virtually the entire browser space by that point.
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Mar 18, 2024
While many users see generative artificial intelligence (genAI) technology as automation tools that will eliminate many of today's jobs, most in the IT industry see it as a generator of knowledge jobs.
That's because genAI tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney can help eliminate mundane tasks, freeing up workers to take on more valuable creative roles and be more productive.
GenAI is also expected to "democratize jobs." That is, the technology will enable employees without computer science degrees to create applications using AI-augmented coding. Already, many companies see that possibility as genAI's "low-hanging fruit."
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Mar 15, 2024
Microsoft this week pushed out 61 Patch Tuesday updates with no reports of public disclosures or other zero-days affecting the larger ecosystem (Windows, Office, .NET). Though there are three updated packages from February, they're just informational changes with no further action is required.
The team at Readiness has crafted this helpful infographic outlining the risks associated with each of the March updates.
Known issues
Each month, Microsoft publishes a list of known issues that relate to the operating system and platforms included in the latest update cycle; for March, there are two minor issues reported:
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Mar 15, 2024
Microsoft never sleeps. In addition to its steady releases of major and minor updates to the current version of Windows 10, the company frequently rolls out public preview builds to members of its Windows Insider Program, allowing them to test out — and even help shape — upcoming features.
Windows Insiders can choose to receive preview builds in one of four channels: the Canary, Dev, Beta, or Release Preview Channel. Insiders in the Canary, Dev, and Beta Channels are now testing Windows 11 builds.
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Mar 15, 2024
Apple has quietly acquired yet another AI startup, Canada's Darwin AI, a company focused on machine vision intelligence, smart manufacturing, improved machine learning efficiency and edge-based intelligence.
All of these seem critical to Apple's future plans.
Who is Darwin AI?
As reported by Bloomberg, several members of the Darwin AI team have now joined Apple. Ostensibly a visual quality inspection company, Darwin AI was developed to provide electronics manufacturers with a tool to improve product quality and production efficiency.
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Mar 15, 2024
Over the next two years, generative artificial intelligence (genAI) will force organizations to address a myriad of fast-evolving issues, from data security to tech review boards, new services, and — most importantly — upskilling employees.
By 2027, AI will represent 29% of organizational spend, according to IDC President Crawford Del Prete, who spoke Thursday at the IDC Directions conference in Boston.
This year alone, the average enterprise will spend $28 million dollars on genAI initiatives, based on data from a February IDC survey. In all, organizations will spend $150 billion on genAI tech initiatives by 2027, with a total economic impact of $11 trillion, according to IDC.
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Mar 14, 2024
There appear to be a couple of snags in the latest iteration of macOS Sonoma that are upsetting to Apple admins: Some USB hubs are no longer recognized by the Mac and a popular command tool used to restart services on remote Apple devices is no longer supported.
Why isn't my USB hub working?
The USB hub issue is emerging across the Apple web at the moment, including on Apple's own support forums and Reddit. The problem isn't consistent — most users aren't affected — and it seems to relate to Macs running the latest version of Sonoma and third-party monitors equipped with USB hubs.
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Mar 14, 2024
Anthropic has launched its most affordable and fastest AI model — Claude 3 Haiku, which the company claims is up to half the cost of GPT 3.5 and works up to three times faster than existing models. This newest addition to the Claude model family joins the ranks of Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3 Sonnet.
Claude 3 Haiku is a cost-effective AI solution offered by Anthropic with a fee of $0.25 per token for input and $1.25 for output. This makes it accessible to enterprises of all sizes, Anthropic wrote in a blog post.
Anthropic argued that Haiku is not only affordable but also efficient. "Businesses can rely on Haiku to quickly analyze large volumes of documents, such as quarterly filings, contracts, or legal cases, for half the cost of other models in its performance tier. For instance, Claude 3 Haiku can process and analyze 400 Supreme Court cases or 2,500 images for just one US dollar," the blog noted.
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Mar 14, 2024
As generative AI (genAI) continues to move into broad use by the public and various enterprises, its adoption is sometimes plagued by errors, copyright infringement issues and outright hallucinations, undermining trust in its accuracy.
One study from Stanford University found genAI makes mistakes when answering legal questions 75% of the time. "For instance," the study found, "in a task measuring the precedential relationship between two different [court] cases, most LLMs do no better than random guessing."
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Mar 13, 2024
Now that Apple has opened up choice to third-party browsers as part of its efforts to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, we can expect a new focus on browser market share in the near future.
Third-party browsers have been supported in iOS since version 14. What's changed is that Apple must now offer EU users a choice of which browser becomes the default when they use their device. Apple clearly didn't want to do this as WebKit (which drives Safari) is fundamental to many of the technologies and solutions the company packs inside its iPhones. (I think it's likely to stay that way.)
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Mar 13, 2024
Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscribers get more frequent software updates than those who have purchased Office without a subscription, which means subscribers have access to the latest features, security patches, and bug fixes. But it can be hard to keep track of the changes in each update and know when they're available. We're doing this for you, so you don't have to.
Following are summaries of the updates to Office 365/Microsoft 365 for Windows, with the latest releases shown first. We'll add info about new updates as they're rolled out.
Note: This story covers updates released to regular Office 365/Microsoft 365 for Windows subscribers. If you're a member of Microsoft's Office Insider preview program or want to get a sneak peek at upcoming features, see the company's "Release notes for Office for Windows Desktop (Beta builds)" page.
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Mar 13, 2024
Devin has the ability to actively collaborate with users during software development. This includes providing real-time progress updates, accepting feedback, and working together to make design choices.
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Mar 13, 2024
Look, we need to talk: The PC industry has a big problem. And it's not hardware makers' fault — it's Microsoft's responsibility. The hardware is here: Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and PC makers have delivered on their end.
Now, everyone is waiting for Microsoft to catch up and make Windows truly shine on these "AI PCs." Can the company deliver something compelling in time?
Want to stay up to date on Windows — and PCs? My free Windows Intelligence newsletter delivers all the best Windows tips and PC news straight to your inbox. Plus, you'll get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (a $10 value) just for subscribing!
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Mar 13, 2024
How did we get to the point where the tech industry is in the user-data business instead of the tech business?
Every day, Google collects data on billions of people worldwide, according to The Regulatory Review. The dodge that users gain some benefit from ad targeting is fallacy. For example, if Google's search were decoupled from its advertising, there would be less chance for users to be misled by ignored search terms and seemingly hard-wired results.
There's nothing beneficial to the user about Google's sponsored search results. That's also true of the adjacent Google ads that follow you around from site to site.
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Mar 12, 2024
A Windows launch isn't the end a process — it's really just the beginning. As with Windows 10, Microsoft continually works on improving Windows 11 by fixing bugs, releasing security patches, and occasionally adding new features.
In this story we summarize what you need to know about each update released to the public for the most recent version of Windows 11 — currently version 23H2. For each build, we've included the date of its release and a link to Microsoft's announcement about it. The most recent updates appear first.
The easiest way to install updates is via Windows Update. Not sure how? See "How to handle Windows 10 and 11 updates" for full instructions. Note that Windows 11 version 23H2 is being released as a phased rollout and may not be available to you in Windows Update yet.
To read this article in full, please click here
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Mar 12, 2024
The US government is lobbying Council of Europe members to weaken an international treaty on human rights and AI software by exempting private vendors from compliance.
Diplomats are meeting in Strasbourg, France, this week to create a final version of the treaty, which would require organizations using AI to respect human rights and adhere to democratic principles. But the US, a non-voting observer of the Council of Europe, appears to be close in its efforts to water down the treaty, Politico reported.
The US, with backing from the UK, a member state, and fellow observer states Canada and Japan, is seeking to exempt private companies from the latest draft of the treaty and have it focus only on government uses of AI. Other negotiators and critics of this plan fear this carve-out would limit the effectiveness of the treaty.
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Mar 12, 2024
The launch of a major Windows 10 update isn't the end of a process — it's really just the beginning. As soon as one of Microsoft's feature updates (such as Windows 10 version 22H2) is released, the company quickly gets to work on improving it by fixing bugs, releasing security patches, and occasionally adding new features.
In this story we summarize what you need to know about each update released to the public for the most recent versions of Windows 10 — versions 22H2 and 21H2. (Microsoft releases updates for those two versions together.) For each build, we've included the date of its initial release and a link to Microsoft's announcement about it. The most recent updates appear first.
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Mar 12, 2024
The European Commission (EC) has violated several key data protection rules in its use of Microsoft 365 regarding the transfer of people's personal data from Europe to other regions not covered by EU data-protection laws, a key European privacy watchdog found.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) on Tuesday chastized the EC after finding it did not take proper protective measures when sending personal data outside the EU and European Economic Area (EEA) when using the cloud-based app.
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Mar 12, 2024
In what perhaps reflects ongoing backroom discussion between Apple's App Store team and EU regulators policing the new Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple has once again modified its approach to supporting third-party software sellers on iOS devices.
Starting later this spring, some EU developers will be able to offer iPhone apps directly from their websites. The second major change since Apple introduced DMA compliance suggests the company is more open to negotiation than some believe.
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Mar 12, 2024
In a strongly worded reply to Elon Musk, OpenAI has described the claims of the X-owner as fictitious, accusing him of attempting to take credit for the "remarkable technological advances" achieved by OpenAI.
Musk's earlier filing at the San Francisco State Court claimed that Open AI had entered into a Founding Agreement stating that it would be open-source and would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons.
In its latest filing, the ChatGPT owner alleged that the Founding Agreement is "a fiction Musk has conjured to lay unearned claim to the fruits of an enterprise he initially supported, then abandoned, then watched succeed without him."
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Mar 12, 2024
Loose cannon, always-looking-for-attention Elon Musk has again thrust himself into the public eye, this time by suing OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman for breaching its founding agreement by turning the company away from its non-profit roots and cashing in on the billions of dollars available in the generative AI (genAI) gold rush.
At stake in the suit is Microsoft's $13 billion investment in the company. Musk claims that OpenAI was originally founded to share its wares with the world by open sourcing its technologies, something it abandoned thanks to the relationship with Microsoft.
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Mar 12, 2024
Meta is suing its former vice president of infrastructure over allegations that he stole proprietary human resources data about the company's top performers, and key information about its data center supply chain partners to bring to his new employer.
In a complaint filed in late February in a California State Court, the software giant alleged that Dipinder Singh Khurana breached contractual agreements, loyalty, and fiduciary duties by taking proprietary, information related to Meta's data centers, supply chain, as well as employee compensation to a Stealth AI startup where he holds a similar position to what he held at Meta.
"Khurana was given access to proprietary, confidential, non-public, and highly sensitive Meta documents and information that only a limited set of Meta's employees can access," according to the complaint. The complaint added that the unauthorized disclosures would hurt competitive advantage, particularly in areas such as AI, data center technology, supply chain operations, and talent retention.
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Mar 11, 2024
Three authors, Abdi Nazemian, Brian Keene, and Stewart O'Nan, are part of a new copyright infringement lawsuit against Nvidia, the latest such suit to challenge generative AI providers' reliance on the "fair use" doctrine to acquire copyrighted material to train their large language models.
The suit, filed late last week, is similar to other suits against generative AI creators, in that it alleges that they used copyrighted material — in this case, works of fiction by the named authors — as training data for an LLM. In this case, the LLM is Nvidia's NeMo Megatron series, which, according to the complaint, uses several data sets known to contain the authors' copyrighted material and used without permission.
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Mar 11, 2024
Healthcare is a huge opportunity for Apple's Vision Pro, with up to three-quarters of US healthcare professionals open to exploring how to use the devices at work, a Tebra survey indicates.
The survey of of 130 healthcare professionals and 1,003 Americans seems well-timed. We've seen a cavalcade of health-related applications for visionOS appear since the device first arrived last month. It's already widely understood that spatial computing will usher in transformative change across a multitude of industries — and healthcare seems ripe for that kind of disruption.
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Mar 11, 2024
Artificial intelligence is not flash in the pan — it is here to stay. Gartner says more than 80% of enterprises will have used some form of generative AI APIs or applications by 2026. If you plan to be among those 80%, then you have to determine the best way to train and deploy it, on premises or in the cloud.
AI training requires specialized hardware that is very, very expensive compared to standard server equipment. It starts at the mid-six figures and can run into the several-million-dollar range. And that hardware cannot be repurposed for other uses such as databases.
In addition to purchasing and maintaining the AI hardware, there is the model on which your AI application is based. Training is the difficult part of AI and the most process intensive. Training can take weeks or even months, depending on the size of the data set. That could be months you don't have.
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Mar 11, 2024
Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption are quickly becoming imperative for businesses and organisations to stay competitive in today's globalised landscape. According to Foundry's Digital Business Study 2023, 93% of organisations have adopted or plan to adopt a digital-first business strategy, while a third of IT leaders are actively researching AI for their digital platforms.
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Mar 08, 2024
With prompt engineers among the workers most in demand in the wake of generative AI's arrival in the enterprise, it was inevitable that someone would investigate whether their role, too, could be automated, or at least facilitated, by AI.
And, indeed, a recent study focused on how to write the best prompts for a large-language model (LLM) AI to solve mathematical problems has found that another AI gets better results than a human. The study sought to determine whether human-generated "positive thinking" prompts—such as "this will be fun!" or "take a deep breath and think"—produce better responses. The results were mixed when using different LLMs.
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Mar 08, 2024
US unemployment in the technology sector increased by 0.2% to 3.5% last month, following an upward trend in joblessness in all sectors.
Technology occupations across the economy declined by an estimated 133,000 positions, according to a new report from IT industry group CompTIA.
Overall, the US unemployment rate among all job markets rose by 0.2% to 3.9% in February, and the number of unemployed people increased by 334,000 to 6.5 million. A year earlier, the jobless rate was 3.6%, and the number of unemployed people was 6 million. While unemployment did tick up, February's rate continued the longest stretch of unemployment below 4% in decades.
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Mar 08, 2024
The first two third-party European app stores to be announced offer different takes on how these stores might work: the first is a white-label service for enterprise app distribution, the second is an all-you-can-eat subscription deal.
The stores are on the cusp of being introduced now that Apple has been forced to open up to third party app stores and payment systems. It seems likely more such stores will soon open, and it's interesting these two seem willing to explore new app distribution business models.
For the enterprise: Mobivention
Initially available in Germany, the Mobivention App Marketplace wants to become a safe place from which to download apps for company employees, partners, and customers.
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Mar 08, 2024
You hear that sound? That's the sound of augmented reality (AR) fading away as a driving concept in technology.
You could blame Apple, which handed down an edict to Apple Vision Pro developers: "Refer to your app as a spatial computing app. Don't describe your app experience as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), extended reality (XR), or mixed reality (MR)."
But blaming Apple would be wrong. Instead, blame artificial intelligence (AI) — specifically the generative AI (genAI) trend of the past year and a half; it's completely upended and re-directed the purpose and function of the glasses formerly known as AR glasses.
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Mar 08, 2024
Esty Scheiner was especially frustrated, even for the CEO of an AI startup. Her team had figured out a better way to deliver deepfake audio detection and met with various IT groups at key enterprises. Most agreed this is going to be an issue that needs to be dealt with — and could use Scheiner's software.
But since the deepfake problem is months, maybe a year away, Scheiner's company couldn't get the backing to do anything about it.
Therein lies an IT problem I've seen in just about every vertical.
It would be easier to accept if IT pros were routinely caught offguard by opportunities or problems they didn't anticipate. Alas, that's not the case. To be blunt, IT decision-makers in the US often see the train charging down the tracks, but they're not permitted to do anything about it until it's pulled into the station and crashed.
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Mar 07, 2024
Citing the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European Union (EU) has requested "further explanations" from Apple regarding its decision to close down the developer account of Fortnite publisher Epic Games. Apple says it does not trust Epic, citing the game developer's history of untrustworthy actions.
This is bad news for Epic, which had hoped to launch its own Epic Games Store on iOS in the EU now that Apple has been forced to open up to third-party stores there.
But perhaps Apple has a point.
When friends become enemies
Apple fans will likely know the background story: Epic kicked off a wave of investigation, litigation, and complaint against Apple's App Store business practices. By doing so, it broke its developer agreement and installed an external payment system within its app, which it knew Apple would reject.
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Mar 07, 2024
With the rollout of Adobe Firefly last year, IBM made generative AI (genAI) image creation available to thousands of designers.
It didn't take long for the tool to make an impression, said Billy Seabrook, global chief design officer for IBM's consulting arm.
Firefly was used, for example, to create 200 visual assets for IBM's "Let's Create" marketing campaign last year that involved rendering an image of a question mark in a variety of textures and colors. Firefly generated many variations — from a question mark made of flower petal to one made of chain link — that designers could choose to then edit and refine into a final product.
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Mar 06, 2024
Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, filed last week in California state court, accuses the defendants of forgetting core parts of OpenAI's stated mission to develop useful and non-harmful artificial general intelligence. Altman has since moved to buttress his responsible AI credentials, including the signing of an open letter pledging to develop AI "to improve people's lives."
Critics, however, remain unconvinced by Altman's show of responsibility. Ever since the rapid popularization of generative AI (genAI) over the past year, those critics have been warning that the consequences of unfettered and unregulated AI development could be not just corrosive to human society, but a threat to it entirely.
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Mar 06, 2024
Elon Musk's intent to take control of OpenAI and merge it with Tesla are at the center of the fight between the controversial Tesla founder and the AI startup he helped get off the ground, but which is now being financed by Microsoft.
That's what OpenAI argued in a blog post Wednesday co-authored by CEO Sam Altman and other key members of the company's leadership team. The post shares Open AI's side of the story after Musk filed a lawsuit against Altman and the company — the creator of ChatGPT — on claims of breach of its founding mission.
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Mar 06, 2024
Though iOS 17.4 could leave European users vulnerable to new threat vectors and third-party app stores, it also introduced an interesting new API Apple is calling FinanceKit. What does it do, and is it an opportunity for your business?
What is FinanceKit?
FinanceKit is a new API for developers that lets them access a person's transaction and balance details from Apple Card, Savings and Apple Cash. It is currently only available in the US.
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Mar 06, 2024
Microsoft has launched a Copilot assistant for finance professionals that it says will automate repetitive processes and provide faster access to financial data.
The Copilot for Finance, unveiled last week, connects Microsoft's productivity apps — most importantly, Excel and Outlook — with a customer's existing financial systems to provide access to information using the Copilot interface.
"Copilot for Finance can streamline audits by pulling and reconciling data with a simple prompt, simplify collections by automating communication and payment plans, and accelerate financial reporting by detecting variances with ease," Emily He, Microsoft's corporate vice president for business applications marketing, said in a blog post.
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Mar 06, 2024
We've been exploring unconventional ways to control your favorite Android device with physical gestures — y'know, real-world movements like shaking and flipping the thing in a variety of specific ways.
But get this: Android also has the ability to let you interact with your phone by simply moving your face.
I kid you not: A cursory glance to the left with your pretty little peepers could take the place of the typical Android Back gesture. An upward glance could open your notifications. And a coy-looking eyebrow raise could take you back to your home screen (as well as make anyone around you think you're the most awkward person alive).
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