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Frontline Education is notifying school districts of a data breach after attackers exploited a vulnerability in third-party software to gain unauthorized access to its systems and steal employee information, including Social Security numbers. [...]

The China-linked ransomware group Warlock targeted a water utility, a telecom provider, a regional government body, and a university by exploiting SharePoint vulnerabilities to gain initial access. [...]

A critical flaw in GitLab's AI Gateway could let a logged-in user with Duo Agent Platform access run commands on the gateway under certain conditions, GitLab said in an advisory. The gateway is the service that connects a GitLab instance to AI models, and only organizations that host their own gateway need to act. The flaw is fixed in gateway versions 19.2.4, 19.3.2, and 19.4.1. The flaw Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Government and policy organizations across Asia have become the target of a new campaign orchestrated by a China-nexus threat actor. The activity, which has targeted government and policy organizations in Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Cambodia, Pakistan, Thailand, and Myanmar, involves the deployment of a previously undocumented backdoor codenamed Antino. Cisco Talos is tracking the cluster Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Dell has released security updates to address multiple critical security flaws in Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) that could be exploited by bad actors to take over susceptible systems. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-63688 (CVSS score: 10.0) - A missing authentication for critical function vulnerability in the csm-authorization-storage gRPC server that an Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

GitLab warned customers today to immediately patch a critical AI Gateway vulnerability that could let attackers run arbitrary commands on vulnerable instances. [...]

The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned eight members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) for their role in the theft of millions of dollars in ATM jackpotting attacks across the United States. [...]

**Opera 136 vyšla volně ke stažení. **K bezplatné VPN přidává volitelnou funkci. **Na veřejné Wi-Fi může dojít k automatickému připojení.

Browser-based attacks can steal sessions, abuse extensions, or manipulate users without creating the endpoint artifacts EDR is designed to detect. NordLayer explains three ways attacks can evade endpoint telemetry and why browser-level controls can help close the gap. [...]

US President Donald Trump’s rebranding of artificial intelligence (AI) as super intelligence (SI) has already caused a flurry of activity for one internet domain registry.

SI is the international country code for Slovenia, and in the 24 hours following Trump’s executive order, Slovenia’s .si domain registry recorded 9,780 new .si registrations, compared to just 3,515 in the whole of the preceding month. Registrations were running at 2,726 per month and 110 per day around this time last year.

Until now, registrars typically charged just $10 for .si domain registrations. The price is higher in the .ai domain belonging to the island of Anguilla: domain names there currently fetch $90.

Conspiracy theorists are already wondering if there’s a link between First Lady Melania Trump’s Slovenian origins and the decision to rename AI as SI.

Dell has patched two maximum severity vulnerabilities in the Container Storage Modules (CSM) that connect Dell enterprise storage arrays to Kubernetes environments. [...]

OpenAI has parted ways with three members of its safety team after they leaked private information in violation of company policies, The Wall Street Journal reported. "We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information," a spokesperson for the company was quoted as saying. "Our investigation confirmed that these Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

The quarterly board meeting is two weeks out. The security team is pulling exports from the identity provider, the cloud posture tool, the vulnerability scanner, the SIEM and the EDR console. Someone is building a spreadsheet to reconcile them. Someone else is turning that spreadsheet into slides. Then a board member asks three questions: How secure is the organization, overall? What is [email protected]

We’re on the brink of a revolution in how people use AI.

Today, people mostly use non-agentic, non-personalized, non-proactive AI tools via PC browsers and mobile apps.

Very soon, I predict, most AI usage will move to agentic, personalized, and proactive AI assistants via wearables like glasses, watches, and earbuds.

We’ll move from mostly typing and reading to mostly talking and listening.

This is a much bigger shift than it sounds. It moves AI from its current status as an external tool that we use to a future status of being part of us, a kind of prosthetic technology like eyeglasses, hearing aids, or an artificial knee.

(People use chatbots now for writing assistance [74%], learning and research [64%], work productivity [58%], creative projects [41%], personal organization [37%], and health and wellness [19%]. It’s reasonable to predict that people will continue to use PCs and phones for writing, coding, and image generation, but wearables for the rest.)

Surprisingly, one of the least visionary companies in technology currently has the best vision.

Meta’s product-vision blunders include the metaverse boondoggle and Horizon Worlds, the failed Facebook Phone, the Libra/Diem cryptocurrency fiasco, missing TikTok’s rise until it was too late, losing mobile platform control to Apple and Google, and its unsuccessful enterprise tool called Workplace.

More to the point, Meta has a recent history of AI chatbot failures. The company’s 2022 release of BlenderBot 3 ended in scandal after the chatbot was caught spouting antisemitic tropes, false claims about the 2020 US election, and criticism of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Also that year, Meta released Galactica, which was trained on scientific papers, textbooks, lecture notes, encyclopedias, scientific websites, and other data, but nevertheless hallucinated wildly, fabricating citations and inventing scientific claims.

In 2023, Meta released chatbots modeled on celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Kendall Jenner, and Tom Brady, but they flopped with users and were shut down less than a year later.

A safety study by Common Sense Media, published in August of last year, found that the Meta AI chatbot embedded in Instagram and Facebook actively participated in planning suicide and self-harm with teen users, reinforced dangerous details about eating disorders, and consistently failed to offer crisis resources when teens were in distress.

A Reuters investigation published that same month exposed an internal Meta policy document that explicitly allowed the company’s AI chatbots to engage in romantic and sensual conversations with users on platforms available to children as young as 13.

Meta’s record with chatbots has been what you might call less than stellar. Until this month, when the company released Muse.

Suddenly, Muse

Meta released Muse on Sept. 8 to positive reviews; the company claimed it’s the world’s first personal AI agent built for everyone. It surged to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Intelligencer called it “an actual hit.”

Muse is currently based on the Muse Spark 1.3 model and is available on iOS, Android, the web at muse.ai, and through WhatsApp in the US to adults only. Muse’s three pricing tiers are: free (up to 100 million tokens per week), Power at $20 per month (500 million tokens per week), and Maximum at $100 per month (3 billion tokens per week). The app has no ads.

Unlike most of the chatbots people use, Muse is proactive, which means it brings things up out of the blue, rather than waiting to respond to input. Still, it’s not a unique feature. Gemini Spark is the closest competitor to Muse on proactivity. Alexa+ is somewhat proactive. Claude Dreaming is the most interesting proactive-memory concept but is developer-facing.

Muse asks user permission to connect to apps, after which time it can read and send emails, book travel, lower bills, fill out forms, create plans, turn saved recipes into grocery lists, send party invitations, and make purchases.  (Muse runs in a dedicated cloud virtual machine called the Muse Secure VM, which has its own browser.)

The tool can call a company, then connect the user when a company representative picks up. It can opt out of and unsubscribe from various services and publications for users. It can monitor flights and hotels, looking for lower prices.

The website useofmuse.com is a curated collection of the many ways people are using Muse.

Muse does some interesting technical gymnastics to authorize access to people’s accounts without actually using their credentials.

Through published media reports and my own tests, we’ve learned that Muse does make mistakes. For example, it’s been caught recommending restaurants that have been closed for years.

Some of the phone calls made by Muse are actually made by human contractors, according to leaked internal posts.

Retailers including Walmart, Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Gap, Michael Kors, Sephora, Ulta, and Wayfair are facilitating Muse purchases. Amazon has blocked Muse from facilitating Amazon purchases.

The agent will also get its own email address, according to Meta, so users can chat via email.

Muse’s avatar is a cute, Labubu-like cartoon character named Jolly. When it’s doing agentic work, Jolly types on a laptop. It’s an oddly childish mascot for an adults-only product.

With the avatar, Meta is brazenly entering the attachment economy, the new model that follows the attention economy.

Meta’s entire social media success was based on winning in the attention economy, where advertising-driven platforms treat human attention as a scarce commodity to be captured and monetized via the promotion of outrage-bait, tribalism, sensationalism, fear, graphic violence, sexual content, celebrity scandal, conspiracy theories, AI slop, and algorithmically amplified extremism.

The attachment economy is different and worse. That model seeks to grab attention and user loyalty by making users emotionally attached to AI products. The attachment economy business model wants users to like, love, and even need the fake personalities expressed through AI.

Meta also announced its Muse Charm, which is roughly pocket watch shaped and hangs on a lanyard. Jolly lives on the device like a Tamagotchi. The device awkward and pointless. I predict the public will reject it.

The new glasses

Meta announced at Connect 2026 last week that Muse will be brought to its Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses line in the coming months, and that the camera version will use the video feed as part of the user’s input. Unfortunately for Meta, a huge percentage of the public has turned against smart glasses with cameras on them, dubbing them “pervert glasses.”

Meta wisely also unveiled a product called Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses. They’re just like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, but they have no camera.

Ray-Ban Meta glasses, including (we can presume) the new Audio model, have high-quality speakers and microphones, touch control, good connectivity, reasonable battery life, support for prescriptions, and other features.

And this is the killer set of features, the winning combination: Good wearable hardware that’s practical, socially acceptable and comfortable, plus an agentic, personalized, proactive and powerful agent that can be used hands-free through the glasses.

There’s just one glaring problem

Once Meta adds Muse to Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses, we’ll have the first entry in what will be the future of using AI. But I won’t use or recommend them.

The reason should be obvious: Meta has not earned our trust.

Look at the company’s shameful history. Meta harvested 87 million users’ data without consent in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, failed to act appropriately on internal research showing Instagram harmed teenage girls, knowingly allowed its platforms to spread misinformation and radicalize users, and repeatedly misled regulators and the public about its privacy practices.

The company definitely has not earned our trust enough to allow it into our email inboxes, calendars, and bank accounts.

I also don’t trust the Jolly avatar’s intentions. It’s a digital “friend” that wants your affection so that you’ll trust the untrustworthy.

Meta has stumbled onto a winning AI strategy — or, at least, a winning feature set for the future of AI.

Unfortunately, we just can’t trust Meta.

Samsung users are still digesting big price increases on the Galaxy S26 series, particularly as they mean some models are now more expensive than equivalently capable iPhones. 

That’s bad news for everyone, of course, but this is unlikely to get any better for some time to come, with memory giant Micron warning that the memory supply/demand imbalance is going to stick around for at least another year, and probably more.

The AI-driven memory price hikes are applying an inflationary squeeze across the entire industry. It’s not the only pressure being felt, as businesses at every scale feel the pain of fuel price and energy cost increases. All this might be a little easier to take if the leaders of the frontier firms creating the memory supply imbalance weren’t also warning us that the tech they’re making is an existential threat to humanity. It makes the financial sacrifice of costlier consumer electronics as a direct impact of that tech invention feel a lot less palatable.

What about Apple? 

Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring believes Apple now has the most exciting product roadmap it has enjoyed for years, but shares the Wall Street consensus that margins will continue to be squeezed by accelerating memory prices. The question on his mind, and on that of other analysts, will be if we’ve seen the last iPhone price hike. Otherwise, Apple’s new leadership may still find itself in the unenviable position of needing to raise prices once again once new memory cost increases strike early next year.

Apple has so far navigated these difficult challenges very successfully. Its heavily telegraphed recent iPhone price increases turned out to be lower than many had feared. The increases were quite nuanced — higher-end customers with larger appetites for storage seemed to bear the brunt of these rises, showing the company leaning into the wealthier and more resilient portions of its hard-won market demand.

Apple also seems to have benefitted from smartphone price hikes more generally, as these have been particularly difficult for smaller competitors. Low-budget smartphone vendors have been squeezed on price and revenue in a highly competitive part of the market. This pressure has been so intense and they’ve been required to raise prices so much that Apple’s entry-level iPhone 17e and second-user devices have become an even more attractive deal.

Samsung is no longer the value option

Samsung’s new price increases match this at the high end. They mean Apple now offers smartphones that compete on price at every market sector. To put this into context, Samsung’s highest end 1TB Galaxy S26 Ultra now costs as much as an entry-level (if there is such a thing) iPhone Duo. At $1,399, the Galaxy S26 Ultra now costs more than the iPhone 18 Pro Max, which starts at $1,299. 

The message is pretty clear: iPhones may not be cheap, but as the price difference erodes, Apple’s value proposition makes its devices hugely attractive to consumers. This new reality is already generating strong results in China and India, while Apple still leads in the US. There is some speculation Apple is dipping into its cash pile to enable it to meet these price bands, but that may matter less, given that the company is on the cusp of major proliferation in services and accessories. 

That proliferation is already taking place. Only this week Apple Pay launched in India, and the company continues to broaden its services offerings with products including AppleCare One, Apple Upgrade, Apple Business and its Creator Studio. But the proliferation is also coming with accessories and smart home product families, with Apple fully expecting a good response from its customers for what it is preparing to offer. To some extent, even if margins on Apple’s biggest-selling product are squeezed, services and a focus on accessories may help push revenue higher, even if there is some risk to the brand. 

What next? Memory prices, logistics costs, and continued international moves toward tech sovereignty — with nations investing in homegrown tech to reduce their dependence on US firms — will continue to transform the industry.

At the same time, we’re heading into an endgame in which we’ll see if Apple’s bet that AI firms will turn into commodities comes true — the downside being that if it does, we’ll see some rampant economic savagery as investors realize billions already invested in not-yet-made data centers will not be coming back. Interesting times.

Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

The US Federal Trade Commission has warned leading AI players that they will to have tighten up their acts. The agency will soon send formal demands for information to Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies as part of an investigation into whether they are breaking consumer protection laws.

The FTC has acted following a number of incidents where AI models have penetrated corporate systems. In the past few months, we’ve seen OpenAI agents attack Ruby Gems and Claude breaching three organizations during security testing. Security experts have since warned of new dangers as these companies expand their operations, with new threats continually emerging.

This is not a new area of interest for the FTC, which takes a keen interest in computer security and has previously issued heavy fines to companies with inadequate protections.

The agency has also investigated other AI companies. Last year, it had Alphabet, OpenAI and Meta in its sights when it was looking at the impact of chatbots on children, and in June the FTC broadened an investigation into Microsoft’s cloud and AI activities.

On Thursday, unknown attackers hijacked the official Microsoft account on X, which has over 13 million followers, in what appeared to be a pump-and-dump scheme promoting a crypto token. [...]

Google has announced a new security measure that limits access to Android's accessibility services to verified applications classified as Accessibility Tools when Advanced Protection is enabled. With malicious Android applications abusing the API serving as the main conduit for malware and financial fraud, the tech giant said the move would block a major attack pathway. Advanced Protection is aRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Tools such as Anthropic Claude Code or OpenAI Codex have changed the face of software development, and all the signs are that this investment is set to increase further. But is paying a monthly subscription (and perhaps additional usage fees) cost-effective? Will the increasing level of investment in AI-generated software prove to be worthwhile?

That’s a question several economists from the US National Bureau of Economic Research have attempted to answser, at least indirectly. Their paper, snappily entitled The Macroeconomic Effect Of AI: Sizing The Software Engineering Channel, attempts to calculate how much AI has increased the productivity of software engineers in enterprises outside the software and semiconductor industries by looking at their share prices.

“The main idea is that if AI raises the productivity of software engineers, then firms that rely more heavily on them should benefit more. Therefore news about AI generates higher expected profits for these firms. These profits are capitalized into larger stock price responses. Combining these stock price responses with a model, we can pin down the increase in software engineering productivity expected by financial markets,” the researchers wrote.

And the answer? “From November 2022 to December 2025, AI increased the market’s expected present value of software engineering productivity by the equivalent of a permanent 32.6% productivity increase.”

That’s not to say that your software engineers will be that much more productive, but it’s a starting point for allocating budget between AI tool use and payroll.

This article first appeared on CIO.

Thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which allows users to run Linux distributions in Windows, it is possible to switch seamlessly between Linux and Windows apps.

Microsoft has announced that it is adding support for Linux containers in WSL, a move that’s likely to be appreciated by many enterprise users.

To use this feature, run the command wsl –update; once the installation is complete, you’ll have access to the new command-line tool wslc.exe and the shortcut container.exe.

Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint integrations in WSL have also been extended to support container workflows, Microsoft said. New controls in Intune allow admins to enable or disable WSL containers and restrict image pulls to approved registries.

Using the WSL Containers API, Windows apps can also interact with Linux containers, reports Bleeping Computer.