Kategorie

A new post-exploitation command-and-control (C2) evasion method called 'Ghost Calls' abuses TURN servers used by conferencing apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to tunnel traffic through trusted infrastructure. [...]

Nigerian national Chukwuemeka Victor Amachukwu has been extradited from France to the U.S. to face charges of hacking, fraud, and identity theft for suspected spearphishing attacks on U.S. tax preparation businesses. [...]

Once upon a time there was an amazing little voice assistant that ended up being exclusively available in Apple products. It was called Siri and it was ahead of its time.

Because Siri seemed pretty magical when it first hit the iPhone; it would answer requests, find out information, and even do useful things such as taking photographs or naming songs you heard on the radio.

Available in numerous languages and with a range of male and female speaking voices, Siri remains the most widely distributed on-device chatbot in terms of language support. The assistant also scaled well, eventually appearing across Apple’s product lines. But critics and competitors now agree, Siri was too ambitious and failed to keep up with the times.

Back to the future

Cast your mind back to 2010 when Siri first appeared for iPhone. At that time, research into artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous technologies, ongoing since the launch of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) in the 60’s, really accelerated. Apple led the charge, at least in terms of media profile, and Siri (which the company acquired soon after its introduction) was a leading-edge challenger in the nascent field

What was great about Siri was its fluffy, friendly image. 

Being an Apple product gave the solution access to a huge market of engaged and happy consumers willing to overcome their general concern at the dystopian application of AI to give the friendly little assistant a try. 

Building acceptance one error at a time

Arguably, Apple’s little assistant helped drive acceptance of technologies that have become critical to today’s cutting edge generative AI (genAI) systems, including:

• Speech recognition
• The idea of intelligent machines
• Devices equipped to listen for your commands 24/7
• Fast and real-time access to information on spoken request
• Andr even real-time transcription.

Siri’s well-publicized errors actually helped build acceptance. After all, if you think about it, the fact that Siri sometimes made mistakes somehow helped humanize it. It is better to think that AI is stupid than to see it as threateningly smart.

This helped a skeptical public come to terms with AI, even while Apple’s assistant embodied a range of concepts people resisted. The logic was that it couldn’t be too bad if machines had this kind of intelligence built inside, right? It’s not as if they are smart enough to fully understand. Did it really matter if the tech listened to you when you thought it was switched off? 

What use would the information picked up be? (The answer: around 81% of UK consumers now claim to have experienced targeted consumer advertising generated by AI.)

Trust in me

We’ve had many debates on these topics since then — debates that show Apple’s commitment to user privacy in AI to be unique, and under attack from competitors and authoritarians alike. It’s almost as if, when some leaders heard Apple CEO Tim Cook warn this is surveillance, they chose to exploit it as an opportunity, rather than protect against it.

All the same, Siri helped people become more capable of placing trust in AI. 

Years later, OpenAI was introduced to a public already more accepting of such tech. That acceptance was to some extent built on the back of Siri adoption, and the appearance of other big name search assistants across the industry.

That acceptance means around 77% of devices in use today have some form of AI, and roughly 90% of organizations are using AI. Investment in the sector is booming, with the tech giants (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta) spending $92.17 billion on capital expenditures in Q2 2025 alone. That’s up a whopping 66.67% on the year ago quarter, mainly on the strength of big investments in data centers, servers, and AI infrastructure.

Hope, hype, and history

The hype around AI is growing as fast as the investments.

Firms in the space are signing massive multi-billion dollar deals, governments are investing vast quantities of cash and resources to support AI industry development, and consumers are preparing to pay for all this investment come the inevitable industry collapse. 

Consumers will pay? Just look at history. We know this because that’s what happened following the dotcom boom, the South Sea Bubble collapse, and the financial crisis, when unsustainable investments came before a fall. We know this because by the time the highly probable AI industry collapse happens, the tech will be so deeply intertwined in our daily lives we will be told these companies are strategically important, making them “too big to fail.”

So we will bail them out.

What follows Siri? 

I come to bury Siri, not to praise it, because competitors say it was ambitious and failed to keep up with them. But if you’d never experienced Siri, would you have trusted ChatGPT? Perhaps a little, but not as much.

For the future of Siri, ask whether privacy continue to be baked in, or will governments get their way when it comes to data encryption, in which case no one will be private unless they can afford to be.

If governments do get their way and Apple is made to take privacy out of its algorithms, just how much of a threat will Siri become to other AI services, which already seem to respect privacy less? Siri doesn’t seem to know the answer (yet).

Though it probably has quite a lot of data to help it work one out.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

MFA blocks 99% of attacks—but weak passwords still let attackers in. Specops helps you enforce strong password policies and MFA everywhere, so one layer doesn't undo the other. Book your free trial today. [...]

Google is the latest company to suffer a data breach in an ongoing wave of Salesforce CRM data theft attacks conducted by the ShinyHunters extortion group. [...]

National Bank of Canada (Banque Nationale du Canada), the sixth largest commercial bank of Canada is currently experiencing a widespread service outage affecting its online banking and mobile app platforms. [...]

ControlVault3 firmware vulnerabilities impacting over 100 Dell laptop models can allow attackers to bypass Windows login and install malware that persists across system reinstalls. [...]

OpenAI has released its first open-weight language models since GPT-2, marking a significant strategic shift as the company seeks to expand enterprise adoption through more flexible deployment options and reduced operational costs.

The two new models — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — deliver what OpenAI describes as competitive performance while running efficiently on consumer-grade hardware. The larger model reportedly achieves near-parity with OpenAI’s o4-mini on reasoning benchmarks while running on a single 80 GB GPU, while the smaller variant matches o3-mini performance and can operate on edge devices with just 16 GB of memory.

“This is a bold go-to-market move by OpenAI and is now really open,” said Neil Shah, VP for research and partner at Counterpoint Research. “This move nicely challenges rivals such as Meta, DeepSeek, and other proprietary vendors both for cloud and more specifically edge.”

Open-weight models provide access to the trained model parameters, allowing organizations to run and customize the AI locally, but differ from traditional open-source software by not necessarily including the original training code or datasets.

Architecture designed for enterprise efficiency

The models leverage a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to optimize computational efficiency. The gpt-oss-120b activates 5.1 billion parameters per token from its 117 billion total parameters, while gpt-oss-20b activates 3.6 billion from its 21 billion parameter base. Both support 128,000-token context windows and are released under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling unrestricted commercial use and customization.

The models are available for download on Hugging Face and come natively quantized in MXFP4 format, according to the statement. The company has partnered with deployment platforms, including Azure, AWS, Hugging Face, vLLM, Ollama, Fireworks, Together AI, Databricks, and Vercel to ensure broad accessibility.

For enterprise IT teams, this architecture could translate to more predictable resource requirements and potentially significant cost savings compared to proprietary model deployments. According to the statement, the models include instruction following, web search integration, Python code execution, and reasoning capabilities that can be adjusted based on task complexity.

“This will accelerate adoption of OpenAI models for research as well as commercial use under Apache 2.0 license,” Shah noted, highlighting the strategic value of the licensing approach.

Total cost calculations favor high-volume users

The economics of open-weight deployment versus AI-as-a-service present complex calculations for enterprise decision-makers. Organizations face initial infrastructure investments and ongoing operational costs for self-hosting, but can eliminate per-token API fees that accumulate with high-volume usage.

“The TCO calculation will break even for enterprises with high-volume usage or mission-critical needs where the per-token savings of self-hosting and open weights will eventually outweigh the high initial and operational costs,” Shah explained. “For low usage, AI-as-a-Service will benefit better.”

Early enterprise partners, including AI Sweden, Orange, and Snowflake, have begun testing real-world applications, from on-premises hosting for data security to fine-tuning on specialized datasets, the statement added. The timing aligns with enterprise technology spending expected to reach $4.9 trillion in 2025, with AI investments driving much of that growth.

OpenAI said that it subjected the models to comprehensive safety training and evaluations, including testing an adversarially fine-tuned version of gpt-oss-120b under the company’s Preparedness Framework. Also, its methodology was reviewed by external experts, addressing enterprise concerns about open-source AI deployments.

According to OpenAI’s benchmarks, the models showed competitive performance: gpt-oss-120b achieved 79.8% Pass@1 on AIME 2024 and 97.3% on MATH-500, while demonstrating coding capabilities with a 2,029 Elo rating on Codeforces. The company reported that both models performed well on tool use and few-shot function calling — capabilities relevant for business automation.

Strategic decoupling from Microsoft

The release has significant implications for OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, its primary investor and cloud partner. Despite the open-weight approach, Microsoft is bringing GPU-optimized versions of the gpt-oss-20b model to Windows devices through ONNX Runtime, supporting local inference via Foundry Local and the AI Toolkit for VS Code, the statement added.

Shah noted that “OpenAI with this move smartly decouples itself from Microsoft Azure and developers can now attach the open-weights models they have been working on and host it if they want to in the future on other rival clouds such as AWS or Google or even OpenAI-Oracle cloud.”

This strategic flexibility could pressure Microsoft to diversify beyond OpenAI partnerships while providing enterprises with greater vendor negotiating power. “This also now offers higher bargaining power for the enterprise against other AI vendors and even AI-as-a-Service models,” Shah observed.

Enterprise deployment considerations

The shift represents OpenAI’s recognition that enterprise AI adoption increasingly requires deployment flexibility. Organizations in regulated industries particularly value data sovereignty options, while others seek to escape vendor lock-in concerns associated with cloud-dependent AI services.

However, enterprises must weigh operational complexity against cost savings. While hardware requirements may be more accessible than previous generations, organizations need expertise in model deployment, fine-tuning, and ongoing maintenance—capabilities that vary significantly across enterprises.

The company is working with hardware providers, including Nvidia, AMD, Cerebras, and Groq, to ensure optimized performance across different systems, potentially easing deployment concerns for enterprise IT teams.

For IT decision-makers, the release expands strategic options in AI deployment models and vendor relationships. The Apache 2.0 licensing removes traditional barriers to customization while enabling organizations to develop proprietary AI applications without ongoing licensing fees.

“In the end it’s a win for enterprises,” Shah concluded, summarizing the broader market impact of OpenAI’s strategic pivot toward openness in the increasingly competitive enterprise AI landscape.

As the volume and sophistication of cyber threats and risks grow, cybersecurity has become mission-critical for businesses of all sizes. To address this shift, SMBs have been urgently turning to vCISO services to keep up with escalating threats and compliance demands. A recent report by Cynomi has found that a full 79% of MSPs and MSSPs see high demand for vCISO services among SMBs. How are [email protected]

WhatsApp is introducing a new security feature that will help users spot potential scams when they are being added to a group chat by someone not in their contact list. [...]

Intel’s 18A process for its upcoming Panther Lake chips faces uncertainty over yields, fueling concerns about production readiness and possible ripple effects across the supply chain.

The process introduces new transistor designs and a more efficient power delivery method, but has so far delivered only a small percentage of chips that meet Intel’s quality standards, Reuters reported.

Intel’s 18A combines gate-all-around transistors with backside power delivery to significantly improve chip speed and efficiency. The technology is pivotal for Intel’s bid to reclaim process leadership, power its next-generation Panther Lake processors, and maintain dominance in the high-end PC market.

However, the yield issue presents a significant hurdle for the chipmaker’s plans to regain an edge in advanced semiconductor manufacturing and challenge Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in the foundry market.

Intel has invested billions in developing 18A, upgrading and expanding its factories to close the technology gap with TSMC. These chips are intended not only to power high-end laptops but also to serve as a showcase for Intel’s contract manufacturing capabilities.

Early tests last year disappointed customers, and recent yields remain below the levels typically needed to launch profitably, according to the report. Without a substantial increase before the planned fourth-quarter 2025 rollout, Intel could face difficult choices, including selling chips at lower margins or at a loss.

Responding to the report, an Intel spokesperson said, “Panther Lake is going to be a great product for Intel and our partners. We are confident in our launch plans and looking forward to delivering our first Panther Lake SKU later this year. We feel very good about our trajectory on Intel 18A, and it will be the foundation of multiple generations of client and server products in the coming years.”

Supply chain concerns

Intel’s potential low yield poses a major threat to the availability of high-end business laptops powered by Panther Lake. This shortfall risks supply bottlenecks for OEMs, especially those counting on Intel chips for AI-enhanced and power-efficient enterprise devices.

As production volumes lag, prices for premium configurations may rise, reflecting higher per-unit chip costs.

“Intel’s 18A node represents its most ambitious process leap in over a decade, but yield estimates fall short of profitability thresholds,” said Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights. “Achieving mature yields of over 70% could realistically take another 12–18 months. This timeline introduces significant risk across the semiconductor value chain.”

Suppliers of substrates, packaging, and EDA tools may experience erratic demand if Intel is forced to rework or scale down chip production. OEM and ODM partners could also face disruptions in Panther Lake launch schedules, leading to redesigns or deferred shipments.

For enterprise IT teams, the implications are deeper: delayed validation cycles, inconsistent hardware platforms, and potential security certification issues if legacy chips are used as fallback options.

“These challenges could push corporate hardware refreshes out by 6–12 months and increase consideration of alternative platforms like AMD or ARM, which offer greater roadmap stability,” Rawat added.

Laptop market share shift

Intel’s trouble is shaping up to be a pivotal moment for the PC market. Analysts warn it could be a “make or break” test for the company’s market share against rivals.

“With Intel’s chips powering two-thirds of laptop shipments and supported by deep-seated enterprise reliance, the ripple effects of low yields on its 18A process will be felt across the entire industry,” said Neil Shah, vice president for research and partner at Counterpoint Research. “The company is facing a difficult choice: push for a timely launch despite low yields, risking significant damage to profitability, or delay the release to improve yields, ceding crucial ground to competitors.”

Analysts estimate that 8–10% of the total laptop PC market that Panther Lake was expected to capture is now effectively up for grabs.

“This presents a prime opportunity for AMD’s Ryzen Pro series, built on advanced TSMC nodes, to double down on the premium enterprise segment,” Shah said. “Concurrently, Apple is also poised to capture share from the high-end market, putting Intel in a tough position from all sides.”

Up to the mid-range segment, including business laptops, alternatives are emerging quickly, with most OEMs now using processors from AMD or Snapdragon. However, for high-end business laptops, Intel remains the preferred choice. “If this does not get addressed soon, it could give Apple an advantage with its MacBook Pro series, which is targeted at high-end business users,” said Faisal Kawoosa, founder and lead analyst at Techarc. “In its recent Q3 results, Apple posted 15% year-over-year growth in MacBook sales revenue, making it the fastest-growing category among the products Apple sells, including iPhones, iPads, and wearables.”

Microsoft on Tuesday announced an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent that can analyze and classify software without assistance in an effort to advance malware detection efforts. The large language model (LLM)-powered autonomous malware classification system, currently a prototype, has been codenamed Project Ire by the tech giant. The system "automates what is considered the gold Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Trend Micro has warned customers to immediately secure their systems against an actively exploited remote code execution vulnerability in its Apex One endpoint security platform. [...]

Historically, Microsoft seems cursed: It’s often early to big technological shifts, and it’s great at prototyping them. But then, after a hype-filled launch where Microsoft celebrates its lead, the company seems to lose interest — while competitors pull ahead and release more polished products.

That’s what appears to have happened with Microsoft’s generative AI (genAI) plans. After a huge push with Bing Chat where Microsoft was the leading consumer AI company at an important moment, the company started moving much more slowly. Copilot use now appears far behind ChatGPT and other competitors.

The good news for investors is that Microsoft is diversified, and it’s set to reap profits selling compute on Azure to companies around the world. But the question is whether Microsoft will be more than an enterprise-focused company selling business solutions going forward.

HoloLens: Early hype, rapid abandonment

Examples of this pattern aren’t hard to find. For instance: Apple, Meta, Google, and Samsung are all investing heavily in augmented reality or mixed reality headsets and glasses. Valve, the company behind the Steam gaming marketplace, may launch a gaming-focused virtual reality headset that runs Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS.

Microsoft, on the flip side, isn’t involved in this space at all. That’s wild because it championed this very type of technology with HoloLens, unveiled in 2015, and showed off glossy consumer-friendly demos using the headset to play Minecraft. Microsoft even built “Windows Mixed Reality” software into Windows 10, letting companies like Samsung (which is now partnering with Google on an Android XR headset) deliver their own headsets that work with Windows PCs. Windows 10’s “universal apps” would have run on HoloLens, too.

Microsoft built hype for HoloLens among consumers, but then never released it as a consumer product, instead retreating to the enterprise. Ultimately, Microsoft signed a multi-billion-dollar agreement to develop a HoloLens-based headset for the US military. Microsoft reportedly lost billions of dollars on the project and this year handed off the US Army headset program to Anduril.

Now, you can use Windows Mixed Reality with a Meta headset — but Microsoft spent billions of dollars and had a huge early lead only to cede the potential market to competitors and even see its enterprise and military ambitions fail. It’s a cautionary tale for what happens if a company starts retreating, slowly backing away from market after market until the entire business has vanished, even as competitors eagerly release their own products.

Smartphones: Early insight, and then…

Back in the early 2000s, years before Apple launched the first iPhone and kicked off the modern smartphone era, I had a friend with a pocket PC running Windows CE. These little palm-sized PCs were the predecessor to the modern smartphone, and Microsoft understood that people would want a computer in their pocket — one that ran apps and could access the web. But the interface was fiddly — based on Windows, complete with a tiny little Start menu.

While Microsoft saw the handheld phone market, then-CEO Steve Ballmer famously laughed at the iPhone when it launched. “That is the most expensive phone in the world — and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.”

“Let’s see how the competition goes,” Ballmer said confidently in 2007. In the years after the iPhone’s launch, Microsoft would scramble to create a new operating system — Windows Phone — with a new interface. Windows Phone ultimately failed. By the time Microsoft had a better interface, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android had commanding leads.

The web: An early vision that stalled with IE 6

Many years before Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft saw that the web was going to be huge. With the release in 1997 of Internet Explorer 4 (IE4), Microsoft deeply integrated the web into Windows. “Active Desktop” technology let you put HTML content on your desktop. Microsoft blurred the line between the operating system and browser, with the company making web apps more powerful with ActiveX technology.

Microsoft’s vision of the web was all about Windows: ActiveX only worked in IE on Windows. It was Microsoft’s homegrown solution, and it had serious security problems. People outside Microsoft had to build new open standards into competing browsers.

The landmark Microsoft antitrust case was a problem, of course: Microsoft’s practice of bundling IE with Windows was a big factor. Then Microsoft seemed to give up on its browser. IE6 was released in 2001. Version 7 wasn’t released until 2006, five years later — after Mozilla Firefox was already grabbing lots of market share.

As with other technologies, Microsoft had an early vision that was correct — the idea that the web would be big and people would want it to do more — and then gave up on it. Microsoft acted as if IE6 and ActiveX would be good enough forever. That left the company perpetually behind rival browsers until it transformed Edge into a Chromium-based browser built on top of the same open-source project as Google Chrome. Microsoft aimed to control the web; it wound up playing catch-up.

Can Copilot become a breakout success?

Now, you can see that with Bing Chat, Microsoft was merely repeating an old pattern. The company invested in OpenAI early, then moved to quickly launch a consumer AI product with Bing Chat. It was the first AI search engine and the first big consumer AI experience aside from ChatGPT — which was positioned more as a research project and not a consumer tool at the time.

Needless to say, things didn’t pan out. Despite using the tarnished Bing name and logo that would probably make any product seem less cool, Bing Chat and its “Sydney” persona had breakout viral success. But the company scrambled after Bing Chat behaved in unpredictable ways.

Microsoft’s explanation doesn’t exactly make it better: “Microsoft did not expect people to have hours-long conversations with it that would veer into personal territory,” Yusuf Mehdi, a corporate vice president at the company, told NPR.

In other words, Microsoft didn’t expect people would chat with its chatbot so much. Faced with that, Microsoft started instituting limits and generally making Bing Chat both less interesting and less useful.

Under current CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is a different company than it was under Ballmer. The past doesn’t always predict the future. But it does look like Microsoft had an early, rough prototype — yet again — and then saw competitors surpass it.

Microsoft is now trying to turn Copilot into a life companion. Let’s say that’s the future: Will Copilot succeed, or will it be another early prototype that shows the rest of the tech industry what to build? The company’s track record isn’t exactly encouraging.

Setting your phone on silent sure ain’t what it used to be.

If you’re among the smart and enlightened animals embracing Android and you’re rockin’ a device that’s been updated to the current Android 16 software, you’ve no doubt noticed a new series of options surrounding your phone’s primary silencing function.

Or, heck, maybe you haven’t. The system is actually kinda convoluted and confusing, and most folks I’ve heard from since the time of Android 16’s arrival either find it to be completely befuddling or, on the flip side, haven’t even found it at all.

The system of which we speak is a snazzy little somethin’ called Modes, and it’s actually an impressively powerful new way to think about controlling exactly how your phone does — and doesn’t — disturb you in different scenarios.

It’s basically like a souped-up, completely customizable version of the traditional Android Do Not Disturb setup. But it takes some serious sleuthing and careful consideration to wrap your head around it and figure out how to best put it to use.

Not to fear, though: I’m here to help. Below, I’ve got seven specific ways to embrace Android’s new maze of Modes magic and get your brain a-buzzin’ about how it can work for you.

[Hey — want even more advanced Android knowledge? Check out my free Android Shortcut Supercourse to learn tons of time-saving tricks.]

Android Modes 101

Before we dive in, let’s back up for one quick sec and explore how, exactly, the Android Modes system even operates and how it differs from Do Not Disturb, in its more traditional sense.

The Modes feature, in the simplest possible explanation, is a series of states you can create to tell your phone how you want it to act at different times.

The traditional Android Do Not Disturb mode, then, is basically just one such mode that tells your phone not to interrupt you with any non-pressing notifications (and, if you weren’t already aware, you can quite easily create Do Not Disturb exceptions on Android that allow certain types of alerts or alerts from certain high-priority people to come through even when that mode is active).

But now, you can create other similar modes that exist alongside that and have their own separate rules for how your phone behaves. So instead of just a single all-purpose Do Not Disturb, in other words, you could have one version of Do Not Disturb for your workday, another for your weekend, and another for when you’re sleeping and/or eating salami — each with its own set of sensible rules to match the occasion and your needs for that specific scenario. (I don’t know about you, but I never want to be interrupted whilst eating fermented meats.)

As for how to actually activate both Do Not Disturb and the other custom modes we’re about to create:

In Google’s standard Android implementation (what’s present on Pixel devices and other phones whose manufacturers don’t overly meddle with the interface)…

• You can activate the standard Do Not Disturb mode by tapping the circle-with-a-line icon in your Quick Settings (which you can see by swiping down from the top of your screen).
• And you can see the Modes menu and select any of your custom modes by pressing and holding that same icon for about a second.

srcset="https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?quality=50&strip=all 800w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?resize=269%2C300&quality=50&strip=all 269w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?resize=768%2C855&quality=50&strip=all 768w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?resize=626%2C697&quality=50&strip=all 626w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?resize=151%2C168&quality=50&strip=all 151w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?resize=75%2C84&quality=50&strip=all 75w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?resize=431%2C480&quality=50&strip=all 431w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?resize=323%2C360&quality=50&strip=all 323w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-google-pixel.webp?resize=224%2C250&quality=50&strip=all 224w" width="800" height="891" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px">Activating Android’s Modes options, as seen in the standard Google Android (Pixel) interface.

JR Raphael, Foundry

In Samsung’s Android 16 setup, meanwhile…

• You can activate the standard Do Not Disturb mode by tapping the circle-with-a-line icon in your Quick Settings (which, notably, is now accessible only if you swipe down from the upper-right area of your screen — and also, by default, you may have to swipe down on the box showing all quick-action icons to expand it and see the Do Not Disturb icon).
• And you can see the Modes menu and select any of your custom modes by tapping the separate Modes button within that same Quick Settings section.

srcset="https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?quality=50&strip=all 800w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=150%2C150&quality=50&strip=all 150w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=300%2C297&quality=50&strip=all 300w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=768%2C759&quality=50&strip=all 768w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=705%2C697&quality=50&strip=all 705w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=170%2C168&quality=50&strip=all 170w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=85%2C84&quality=50&strip=all 85w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=485%2C480&quality=50&strip=all 485w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=364%2C360&quality=50&strip=all 364w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/android-modes-samsung.webp?resize=253%2C250&quality=50&strip=all 253w" width="800" height="791" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px">The Android Modes menu in Samsung’s Android interface.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Got it? Good. Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

1. Android Modes: For work

First and foremost, how ’bout a specific version of Do Not Disturb for your workday — whenever and wherever that may transpire?

By creating a mode for this particular purpose, you can leave the standard Do Not Disturb setup — the one that’s easiest to activate, with just a single tap (as we went over a moment ago) — in its purest, most pristine state, with no exceptions and a complete and total silencing of any and all interruptions.

Then, when you’re working, you could allow notifications to come in from work-related apps like your email, Slack, and anything else that might be pertinent for that part of your life but pause interruptions from more personal apps and messaging services. You could even get super-nuanced and specify exactly which contacts are allowed to interrupt you with titillating texts in Google Messages, if you want to limit the missives that distract you during the day.

To create this mode:

In Google’s standard Android implementation…

• Head into the Modes section of your system settings, tap “Create your own mode” at the bottom of the screen, then select “Custom.”
• Name the mode “Work” and give it any icon you like, then scroll down at tap “Done” at the very bottom of that screen.

You can give your custom modes any name and icon you like.

JR Raphael, Foundry

• Now, think about if you want the mode to activate automatically during certain days and times or if you’d rather just activate it manually on your own, as needed. If you want a set schedule, tap “Set a schedule” to create it.
• Then, tap “Apps” to tell your phone exactly which apps should be allowed to alert you whenever that mode is active.
  • You’ll want to be sure “Selected apps” is active, then tap the gear-shaped icon alongside that to pick the apps you want — and, if you’re feelin’ especially ambitious, get even more nuanced to pick exactly which types of notifications each app is allowed to push through.

Your custom modes can even allow and prohibit specific types of notifications within apps.

JR Raphael, Foundry

• Next, tap “People” to set up which contacts can text or call you and interrupt when your work mode is active. If you want all messages or calls to come through, be sure to select “Anyone” for each of those categories.
• And finally, tap “Alarms & other interruptions” to confirm you’re allowing alarms, media sounds, reminders, and calendar events to arrive while this mode is on.

And that’s it: You’ll now see your spiffy new work mode within the Android Modes Quick Settings list, and whenever it’s active, you’ll see the icon you selected for it in the status bar area at the top of your screen.

Our first custom mode, for work — all set up and active.

JR Raphael, Foundry

In Samsung’s Android setup…

• March into the Modes and Routines area of your system settings and tap “Add mode” at the bottom of the screen.
• Name the mode “Work” and give it any icon you like, then tap “Done” at the bottom of that screen.
• If you want the mode to activate itself automatically, tap the “Turn on automatically” box.
  • Samsung has actually expanded the options here in some interesting ways: In addition to selecting a consistent day and time for your mode to come on, you can specify a physical location as well as a Bluetooth connection and all sorts of other useful conditions to act as triggers for making the mode enabled.

Samsung has some interesting extra options for how your modes can be activated.

JR Raphael, Foundry

• Tap “Stay focused” and then “Do not disturb” to set up restrictions around what kinds of calls and messages as well as app-generated notifications can get through whenever this mode is active.

You can set up specific notification rules on a Samsung device, too — just with a slightly different presentation and place.

JR Raphael, Foundry

And with that, the basics are all in place — and just like with the standard Android interface, you can now activate your new mode anytime and see its icon in your status bar whenever it’s active.

2. Android Modes: For focus

For our next custom Android Modes option, why don’t we create a separate setup for times of intense focus?

While your standard workday mode might allow lots of work-related (and maybe some personal) interruptions, your focus mode could be much more restrictive and meant for moments when you’re deeply zoned in on something important. It could also add in options to limit distractions beyond just the basic calls, messages, and notifications we set up in our work version.

The steps for starting and setting up the mode are exactly the same as above, so I won’t repeat myself and go over all of that again. Instead, here are the types of Modes settings you might think about within those same areas for this purpose:

• Fewer safe-listed people for messages and calls
• Fewer apps and specific types of alerts for notifications
• No reminders or media sounds
• And, within the “Display settings” area of the Modes configuration (or the “Other actions” area, in Samsung’s interface), options such as:
  • Hiding notification dots on app icons
  • Hiding status bar icons at the top of the screen
  • Not popping up notifications
  • Keeping your screen in grayscale
  • Keeping your always-on displayed powered off

Restricting distractions is simple with any custom Android mode you create.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Samsung’s interface tucks some of those same options away within a separate “Add action” menu and doesn’t offer all of the same choices. But no matter what kind of phone you’re using, you’ll find plenty of helpful possibilities for making this mode worthwhile.

3. Android Modes: For meetings

Perhaps one of the most useful Android Modes paths to ponder is a mode made specifically for moments when you’re in a meeting — be it in person, on a voice call, or via one of the zillions of Zoom-like video chatting services we all see on our calendars each and every day.

The beauty of how Android’s Modes system handles this is that you can just tell your phone to automatically activate your meeting mode anytime an event is occurring on your connected calendar(s).

To make that happen, in the standard Google Android setup, you’ll select “Set a schedule” and then “Calendar events.” You can then tap that same line once more to limit the events to a specific category within your calendar as well as a specific status for the event.

The ability to connect custom Android modes to specific types of calendar events? Yes, please!

JR Raphael, Foundry

Puzzlingly, Samsung’s Android interface doesn’t seem to offer any similar option — in spite of the many varied possibilities it does possess. (Sorry, Galaxy pals.)

On any other Android device, though, you can then review the various variables to decide precisely what sorts of interruptions you do and don’t want to allow whenever you’ve got an event going and rest easy knowing nothing else will bother you during those meeting-oriented moments.

4. Android Modes: For driving

Distracted driving is one of the worst ways phones have affected our lives — but Android’s Modes setup offers an enticing way to help avoid the harmful (and quite possibly also illegal) temptation to take your eyes off the road and to make your device more actively useful whenever you’re behind the wheel.

Google’s standard Android setup and Samsung’s Android interface both offer a premade driving mode that uses a combination of motion and Bluetooth connections to automatically detect when you’re driving and then adjust your phone’s behavior as a result. Just look for the pre-existing “Driving” option within your Modes settings screen to activate and configure it.

Samsung’s setup is actually the more advantageous one here, as in addition to limiting alerts, it’ll also offer to automatically read any incoming notifications aloud for you as they arrive anytime your driving mode is active.

Samsung’s driving mode will even automatically read incoming notifications aloud for you as they appear.

JR Raphael, Foundry

You can achieve a similar effect with any device via Android Auto and its connection to your car — provided the vehicle supports it — but having that built directly into the operating system as a part of the mode itself is a pretty nifty touch.

5. Android Modes: For the weekend

So far, we’ve focused mostly on making your device as optimal as possible for when you’re working or otherwise actively invested in some sort of specific activity. So how ’bout a custom Do Not Disturb mode for the weekend, when you’re trying to avoid doing anything productive but might still want to see personal messages, reminders, and perhaps (perhaps) some particularly pressing work-related alerts?

Create a weekend mode and set it up with those specific parameters, and you can easily tune out as much as possible and avoid thinking about work whenever you’re unwinding.

And remember: You can opt to have this mode automatically activate itself from Friday night through Monday morning — or whenever your weekend occurs — if you want to save yourself the trouble of even having to think about it at all.

6. Android Modes: For vacation

Vacation mode is — or at least should be — even more unfocused than an average weekend. So while we’re mulling over all the modes worth making, take a moment to make yourself a vacation-specific setup that you can activate whenever the time comes to fully shut down the ol’ noggin for an extended hiatus.

Your vacation mode might be extra-restrictive on the types of work-related alerts it allows and the apps it blocks from being present. Only you know how far you can take it, of course, but if you think about it proactively and get the mode ready to roll now, you’ll be ready to hibernate and avoid all unnecessary distractions as soon as that time arrives.

7. Android Modes: For sleeping

Last but not least, now that we’re reframed the standard Android Do Not Disturb mode as a state where nothing gets through and interrupts you, it might be practical to create a separate custom mode for sleeping — with whatever settings suit you for those hopefully zoned-out hours.

Once more, you’ll find a ready-made starting point to work from — “Bedtime,” in Google’s standard Android implementation, and “Sleep” in Samsung’s. Tap that within the Modes area of your system settings, then think carefully about exactly which interruptions you want to allow and what settings would work best for that purpose.

Aside from the obvious people and notification exceptions, be sure to look through the other options that could be relevant and useful here — such as:

• Ensuring alarms will always still sound even when this mode is active
• Implementing a grayscale, dimmed-wallpaper, and/or dark-theme state and telling the screen never to illuminate when you aren’t actively using it
• And deactivating alerts for anything that wouldn’t be urgent enough to warrant waking, including media sounds, calendar events, and reminders

All that’s left is to get your brain to follow suit and stop interrupting your slumber — and that part, I’m afraid, is squarely on your sleepy shoulders.

Get six full days of advanced Android knowledge with my free Android Shortcut Supercourse. You’ll learn tons of time-saving tricks!

​Microsoft paid a record $17 million this year to 344 security researchers across 59 countries through its bug bounty program. [...]

Trend Micro has released mitigations to address critical security flaws in on-premise versions of Apex One Management Console that it said have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-54948 and CVE-2025-54987), both rated 9.4 on the CVSS scoring system, have been described as management console command injection and remote code execution flaws. "A vulnerability in Trend Micro Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of cyber attacks carried out by a threat actor called UAC-0099 targeting government agencies, the defense forces, and enterprises of the defense-industrial complex in the country. The attacks, which leverage phishing emails as an initial compromise vector, are used to deliver malware families like MATCHBOIL, MATCHWOK, and Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

When Technology Resets the Playing Field In 2015 I founded a cybersecurity testing software company with the belief that automated penetration testing was not only possible, but necessary. At the time, the idea was often met with skepticism, but today, with 1200+ of enterprise customers and thousands of users, that vision has proven itself. But I also know that what we’ve built so far is only [email protected]

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added three old security flaws impacting D-Link Wi-Fi cameras and video recorders to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The high-severity vulnerabilities, which are from 2020 and 2022, are listed below - CVE-2020-25078 (CVSS score: 7.5) - An Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]