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​Veeam warned customers about boot failures affecting Software Appliance virtual machines (VMs) on hosts with AMD EPYC processors. [...]

Threat actors are attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security flaw impacting OpenSSH that can enable sign-ins to accounts that have no password set, according to Previdian. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-123158 (CVSS score: 8.1) and codenamed SSHole (or *sshole), impacts Linux systems that run OpenSSH on the musl C library with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) disabled, Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Residential proxies are often used by bad actors to hide the true source of internet traffic — and now one of them appears to have taken up residence in the White House.

The Residential Proxy Observatory, set up by Layer3 Intel to monitor the threat of anonymized network activity, has identified proxy exit activity on one particular network, AS2650, which is registered to the executive office of the US President and operated out of the White House.

Residential proxies — so-called because they typically run on home or personal devices — mask the true source of internet traffic by rerouting it to appear to come from a different IP address. While it may be concerning that this is activity to be found in one of the protected workspaces in the US, this is in line with recent research from Infoblox, which found that residential proxies were widespread throughout enterprises.

While not illegal per se, residential proxies can be used by bad actors for activities that most definitely are illicit, for example, denial-of-service operations or distribution of malware.

The Residential Proxy Observatory has also found evidence of their activity on the island of St Helena, one of the most remote locations on the planet, so there really is no place on earth to hide from internet interference.

This article first appeared on CSO.

IMSI and IMEI are IDs your phone shares with networks. Learn how they differ, how attackers get them, and why rotating your IMSI blunts tracking. [...]

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled GPT‑6 Cyber, which it described as a major step forward in security research that brings together stronger cybersecurity capabilities with a step-change improvement in model alignment. The new model is "more capable at finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and far more reliable staying within the boundaries researchers set," OpenAI said. It has classified the model as Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Meta has hit pause on new terms of service for its business customers that would have granted it the right to grab any content from their websites. Not only that, but it would also have shifted the blame for every error produced through faulty AI to its customers.

The new terms of service were revealed on October 19 and initially due to take effect on October 30, though Meta later pushed the start date back to November 20.

But that small delay wasn’t enough to calm customer pushback, and now Meta has posted a note on Facebook’s business help center saying that the update had now been paused indefinitely.

Given the strength of feeling, Meta’s U-turn will not have come as a surprise. The terms would have been seen as far too onerous for customers, as well as exposing them to a legal minefield of the sort that UK regulators recently warned about.

In a statement to Harvard’s Nieman Lab, the company said that “We’re pausing the changes as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our time to get this right.”

Meta has had a troubled time recently. Two weeks ago, it was fined for illegal use of customers’ data and in May, the company laid off 8,000 employees.

This article first appeared on CIO.

Meta has hit pause on new terms of service for its business customers that would have granted it the right to grab any content from their websites. Not only that, but it would also have shifted the blame for every error produced through faulty AI to its customers.

The new terms of service were revealed on October 19 and initially due to take effect on October 30, though Meta later pushed the start date back to November 20.

But that small delay wasn’t enough to calm customer pushback, and now Meta has posted a note on Facebook’s business help center saying that the update had now been paused indefinitely.

Given the strength of feeling, Meta’s U-turn will not have come as a surprise. The terms would have been seen as far too onerous for customers, as well as exposing them to a legal minefield of the sort that UK regulators recently warned about.

In a statement to Harvard’s Nieman Lab, the company said that “We’re pausing the changes as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our time to get this right.”

Meta has had a troubled time recently. Two weeks ago, it was fined for illegal use of customers’ data and in May, the company laid off 8,000 employees.

This article first appeared on CIO.

The UK’s digital watchdogs have warned enterprises that they can’t evade their legal responsibilities by blaming errors on AI agents that they have deployed.

“By taking action on behalf of users, such as making purchases and communicating with businesses, these agents could transform how people use digital services, engage with markets and unlock wider innovation,” said the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF), a body comprising the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and communications regulator Ofcom, in a joint statement.

While the DRCF welcomed such uses it advised, “firms developing or deploying personal agents should think carefully about how consumers can understand when and how an agent acts on their behalf, how authority to act is given and how their personal data is used.”

The DRCF didn’t pull its punches. “We want to be explicit that existing legal and regulatory frameworks apply to personal AI agents, including competition, consumer and data protection law, online safety, financial services, payments and cyber security requirements,” it said, adding, “An AI agent’s autonomy does not diminish the responsibility of organisations that deploy it to comply with applicable law and relevant regulation.”

There is certainly a degree of uncertainty over the legal position of autonomous AI agents. Gartner has warned that companies are increasingly facing legal challenges over “AI-induced” decisions, while attorneys have weighed in over gray areas in AI governance.

The four UK regulators aren’t immune to that doubt: Only a few weeks earlier, they issued a Call for Input on their 2027-27 work plan to help them avoid overlap and uncertainty about the interplay between their respective regulatory regimes.

This article first appeared on CIO.

Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis says a recent attack on its systems and internal tools has exposed credentials and live tokens for all customers. [...]

OpenAI is buying Pierre Computer Company in order to incorporate the San Francisco-based software developer’s Code.Storage infrastructure layer for Git into its Codex AI-powered programming tool.

Pierre Computer, whose employees number just barely in the double digits, has got plenty of clout for its small size. It’s well-known for Code.Storage offering, as well as for its open-source software libraries, Trees and Diffs, which OpenAI already uses in Codex.

OpenAI has experienced some of the limitations of Git itself, and its in-house engineering teams are already working to improve its support for human coders and AI agents working in parallel. Earlier this week the company described how it built a new back end for Git repositories, Pando, to enable concurrent working at scale.

The AI developer has been pushing Codex more aggressively this year: offering it to Mac users and expanding it to Windows. It cited Pierre Computer’s ability to help developers review code as one of the reasons for the acquisition. OpenAI highlighted the Diffs’ Edit mode and the recently released Highlights as components that were particularly helpful to development teams.

Announcing the deal on its news page, OpenAI set out how it would integrate the company into its existing offerings. “With the Pierre team, we wish to set the standard for modern software development: from the first branch an agent creates to that magic moment when code is deployed to the world. We want to make Codex the place where developers and agents take on their most ambitious projects.”

Neither company disclosed details of the acquisition price. OpenAI said that Code.Storage customers will be able to continue using the product until it brings the features into Codex, while Pierre Computer’s open-source projects will remain open, and OpenAI will continue to contribute to them.

This article first appeared on InfoWorld.

Box has introduced a new natural-language AI tool that helps users build automated workflows around document-related processes.

Box Architect, announced at BoxWorks 2026 on Thursday, “effectively acts as an agentic operator of Box’s core content and workflow capabilities … to help customers design any content agentic workflow in Box,” said Aaron Levie, Box CEO, on X.

To create a workflow, users describe in plain language a goal or process that they want to automate. Architect then defines the necessary stages and decisions, applying existing permissions, classifications, and retention policies related to content in Box.

Users can test the workflow before it’s published, with options to insert requirements for human review and approvals. Once deployed, Architect can monitor a workflow’s outputs and recommend improvements as it’s continuously used.

Architect interacts with multiple existing Box tools. A bank might use Architect to design and build a client onboarding workflow that collects applications via Box Forms, for example, then verify the documents with Box Extract, sign agreements with Box Sign, and begin account setup with Box Automate.

Jason Andersen, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said Architect will make it easier to build agents and workflows based on the collective knowledge of a team or business, rather than focused only on their own productivity.

As with any AI system that involves business data, customers will still need to evaluate how those workflows perform, said Andersen.

“I’d still recommend human oversight during the creation process with any agent development project and using observability tools to make sure that the agents are running in a fashion that meets the risk and cost management needs of the business,” he said.

Architect is due to launch in beta in Q4 2026 for Box Enterprise Advanced customers. Pricing has not been disclosed.

Box doesn’t publish a price for Enterprise Advanced, its highest tier. Enterprise Advanced includes an allocation of 20,000 AI Units that are used to measure consumption of certain Box AI features.

Box also announced a new Context Retrieval engine that Levie said will “deliver better results for agents” that connect to documents held in Box.

Built on Nvidia’s Nemotron Retriever open model, Context Retrieval enables faster indexing and lower latency is “designed to find and deliver more relevant enterprise context to AI agents,” said Box CTO Ben Kus.

It uses multimodal indexing to scan documents, images, audio, and video, and combines keyword and semantic search to find information when a user’s query doesn’t contain the exact terms used in a document. The Content Retrieval engine applies existing permissions in Box so that agents can only retrieve what a user is authorized to access.

Internal testing showed that tool led to a 20% improvement to search accuracy, said Kus, with “fourfold faster question-answering.” It also resulted in “up to 90% fewer tokens sent to downstream models,” he said.

Andersen from Moor Insights sees a wider increase in use of context retrieval systems more generally. These types of tools are “significantly improving output accuracy and agentic performance, both of which lead to higher end user satisfaction and lower costs,” he said.

Box’s use of Nemotron’s open-weight model further improves the value proposition, according to Andersen.

“However, to get the most benefit from context management, a good set of design principles and governance are also needed, so customers need to be sure to account for that effort to get the most benefits,” he said. 

The Context Retrieval engine will be generally available to Enterprise Advanced customers early next year, Box said.

D-Link shared mitigation measures for multiple unpatched security flaws affecting DGS-3130 series managed Gigabit stackable switches. [...]

A fix for CVE-2026-83844, a remote code execution flaw in Windows Paint, is now in the Microsoft Store. Paint gets this fix only through a Store update, not through Windows updates. The fixed build, 11.2609.401.0, was the newest Paint build in all ten countries The Hacker News checked today. The flaw is an out-of-bounds read that could let an attacker run code over a network. Microsoft rates Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A browser extension that can run scripts on claude.ai could make Claude Desktop run code on a person's computer, researchers at Forever Security, an endpoint security company, showed in a test. The attack needs Dispatch, a Claude feature that lets people send tasks from their phone to Claude Desktop. The flaw that makes this possible can still be exploited, the researchers said earlier this Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft is extending undisclosed usage caps to additional Copilot Chat features for enterprise users who already pay for Microsoft 365 subscriptions but do not hold separate Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, restricting access to certain AI capabilities and nudging users to upgrade to a paid Copilot-specific license.

Before the change, commercial users could access Copilot Chat at no additional cost through eligible Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions, including Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, Office 365 E3 and E5, and Microsoft 365 E3 and E5.

While Microsoft already applied fair-use limits to certain capabilities, such as image generation, it is now extending usage restrictions to additional Copilot Chat features, without specifying which capabilities will be affected or disclosing the thresholds governing their use.

Under the new usage policy, users who reach a feature’s fair-use limit will receive an in-product notification indicating when access will become available again. Administrators, too, cannot view, configure, or override them, according to a portal that archives Microsoft 365 Message Center notifications.

The rollout began November 2 for enterprises with 2,000 or fewer Microsoft 365 seats and is scheduled to begin November 9 for organizations with more than 2,000 Microsoft 365 seats.

Related: Microsoft backtracks on Copilot Chat access in M365 apps

Unpredictable limits could disrupt productivity

The undisclosed usage caps on Copilot Chat are likely to reduce productivity for business users and push employees towards alternative tools with similar capabilities, said Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting.

Primarily because of the unpredictability of the usage caps, echoed Nhat Bui, deputy director of engineering at Scopic Software. “If someone knows they get 50 requests a day, they plan around it. If a feature stops working mid-afternoon without warning and they can’t tell when or why, they stop relying on it for anything that matters.”

“People only build AI tools into their daily work once they trust it will be active when they need it. A tool that sometimes isn’t available becomes a nice extra, not part of how the work gets done,” Bui added.

The risk of users abandoning AI tools because of unpredictable usage limits is already evident in AI coding environments, where developers who hit limits midway through tasks often have to switch tools and rebuild their context, Bui further added.

Such tool-switching could also create a broader governance challenge for CIOs, as employees frustrated by usage restrictions turn to alternative AI tools that fall outside their enterprises’ approved technology environments, increasing the risk of shadow AI, Jain pointed out.

The bigger challenge for CIOs will be budgeting and managing expectations, said Manoj Chandra Jha, principal analyst at Nord-IQ Research. “They are being asked to drive AI adoption while planning around limits they can’t clearly see, which makes budgeting and managing expectations much harder.”

As a solution to the undisclosed usage caps, CIOs could use internal usage data to identify employees who rely most heavily on Copilot Chat and prioritize them for paid licenses, while communicating the limitations of the included offering to other employees, Jha said.

“CIOs should also press Microsoft for greater transparency around usage thresholds to make AI adoption and budgeting more predictable,” he added.

Usage limits could also create risks for Microsoft

Further, analysts pointed out that the undisclosed limits might not only be a problem for CIOs but also for Microsoft, from a competitive differentiation standpoint.

As enterprises increasingly factor cost predictability into their AI purchasing decisions, providers that offer transparent usage thresholds and pricing could gain a competitive advantage, Jain said.

The undisclosed usage caps combined with the nudge to upgrade to a paid Copilot-specific license could also attract regulatory attention in Europe, where Microsoft has previously faced scrutiny over how it bundles products and uses its established Microsoft 365 customer base to distribute additional services, according to Jha.

In June 2024, the European Commission issued its preliminary findings, saying Microsoft had breached EU competition rules by bundling Teams with its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 productivity subscriptions.

The Commission had argued that including Teams with these subscriptions gave the collaboration platform a distribution advantage over competing services, including Slack.

Microsoft subsequently proposed changes to its licensing and pricing arrangements, including offering Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscriptions without Teams at lower prices. The company also agreed to improve interoperability with competing collaboration tools.

In September 2025, the European Commission accepted Microsoft’s commitments, bringing the investigation to a close without imposing a fine. The commitments included lower-priced subscriptions without Teams and measures to improve interoperability and data portability.

In the case of Copilot, regulators could examine whether the new restrictions give Microsoft’s paid AI assistant an unfair advantage over competing AI providers seeking access to the same enterprise customers, Jha said.

However, usage restrictions are not inherently anti-competitive, Jha pointed out. Even so, regulators could scrutinize whether Microsoft is leveraging its control over the Microsoft 365 distribution channel to steer customers towards Copilot at the expense of competing AI assistant providers, Jha added.

An update on Athena, and some unsolicited predictions on what's coming next On Saturday, Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier. I agree with him. Go read it if you haven't. I've spent the summer looking at what these models find, and the gap he describes between what they can do and what the rest of us are ready for is the one I've been staring at since May. The hardest piece of [email protected]

OpenAI has responded to the data center culture war pitting communities against tech companies with a proposal to reduce its power demand during periods of grid strain.

The company is also mindful of the bad publicity generated by talk of data centers and has renamed them “compute campuses” in an attempt to make them less scary. This is in line with the recent trend for renaming places like the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, or rebranding artificial intelligence as super intelligence.

The new name cropped up four times, and data centers just twice, in OpenAI’s announcement of its Grid Protectors Program, a proposal to dial back electricity consumption in its data centers when demand is high so that nearby homes can continue to run their air conditioning or heating.

Data centers’ increasing power consumption is straining the grid, with AI servers accounting for an ever larger share of that consumption, with further increases forecast. These demands are leading to a growing number of protests against the development of data centers, which could lead to construction delays.

OpenAI claims that its Grid Protectors Program will meet some of those issues head-on by taking into account future capacity needs and working to make power flexibility a key element in data center, sorry, compute campus, design. The company said that the approach would differ, region by region. It has yet to finalize all the details of the scheme, but it hopes to head off some of the protests. It remains to be seen whether it has this effect.

Google recently took the opposite approach to the peak consumption problem, proposing to pay people to turn off their appliances at times of high demand so that it can continue to power its data centers.

This article first appeared on Network World.

Remember when Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil”? Boy, wasn’t that a long time ago! It was more than ten years ago, and they replaced it in 2015 with “Do the right thing.” That hasn’t aged well either.

Today, we’re seeing how Google’s losing-its-way is finally catching up with the onetime darling of the no-longer-quite-so-magnificent Magnificent Seven. There are many reasons why big tech players are floundering in shrinking valuations AI infrastructure overspending and the political backlash against AI data centers. But Google, Google is special.

For example, as any of you who rely on Google advertising to market your products and services — or media companies that rely on it for profit — have seen, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are sinking customers’ ad revenue.

For businesses that rely on Google organic search, things are much worse. Oh sure, Google Search Ecosystem general manager Mrinalini Loew claims, “AI Overviews and AI Mode are designed to help people find and visit great websites, and to help publishers and websites strengthen their audiences.”

That’s not what the websites are seeing. In fact, they’re seeing the opposite. Search Engine Land reports that three in four sites’ home pages have seen their traffic shrink in the past year. In the meantime, Ahrefs found that the “presence of an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page.” More specifically, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in the company’s latest earnings call that Google search referrals declined “meaningfully” because searchers didn’t go any farther than AI Mode and AI Overviews, instead of clicking onto Reddit. 

Now, where does Google make its money? Why, that would be ad sales, wouldn’t it? So what happens when publishers and advertisers start seeing less and less return? They stop spending money on Google ads, don’t they? As Forrester analysts pointed out last week, “The company’s advertising revenue growth slowed to 12%, its slowest rate in five quarters.”

You’d think Google would have seen this coming, wouldn’t you? But its executives, too, are blinded by AI madness. Now it’s starting to sink Google’s own ad business.

Oh sure, for now, Google’s internet search ad revenue rose to $63.35 billion, up 12%, vs. estimates of $64.87 billion, or 14.8% growth. So what? Spoiler alert: People don’t buy Google for its revenue. No, Google is still judged by its growth, and Google is no longer growing.

The result? You’re getting less value from Google ads, and Google’s stock price has declined. As of November 6th, Alphabet’s GOOGL shares have fallen about 18% over the past 30 days. That includes a single-day drop last week that wiped out $500 billion in market value.

Betting on Google, both in the market and as the foundation for your ads, seems like less and less of a good bet.

Worse, Google seems to want to throw away whatever goodwill it has left by shoving AI down the throats of school systems. Google now insists that schools must turn on its AI tools in its K-12 student software. Otherwise, they won’t be able to use Google Search.

Sure, there are search alternatives. DuckDuckGo says people are already moving to its service because they’re sick of Google forcing AI slop on them. But Google dominates the educational market. According to About Chromebooks, Chromebooks now run 60.1% of the global K-12 device market in 2026 … and 93% of US school districts are buying more this year.

Google’s AI diktat is going over like a lead balloon in schools. As Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told NBC News, “Instead of working with teachers and parents to uphold privacy and ensure their tools are safe and useful, it throws the baby out with the bathwater and bans access to the tools altogether.”

Former FTC chair Lina Khan tweeted, “Google is using its search monopoly to coerce schools into adopting AI. This highlights the danger of allowing an unregulated monopolist to control an essential service.”

Put it all together, and, as unthinkable as this would have been even months ago, it’s time to start looking for Google alternatives. What will that be? I don’t know yet. I don’t think anyone does. But my Google crystal ball is showing lots of cracks.

Simplicity and convenience are a tough combo to beat.

That’s why basic features integrated into the productivity apps we’re already using almost always win out over more capable and complex third-party options, at least when it comes to most mainstream use — and why Google’s latest easily overlooked addition to its Workspace office suite is well worth your while to notice.

The addition is called, rather confusingly, Google Pics. (If you ever mix up Google Pics with Google Photos or Google Images, don’t worry: Google Lens can help you sort it out.) Pics, unlike its similarly named Google app contemporaries, is meant to exist primarily within the Google Drive ecosystem as opposed to being its own standalone entity.

The easiest way to think about it is as a newly souped-up, superpowered image editor and graphic creator that lives directly within Google Docs and Slides — and, eventually, also within Drive itself. It’s a fuss-free way to let you make new artwork and refine existing images in your documents and presentations, and it’s surprisingly powerful and effective in what it’s able to do.

Critically, it’s also both simple and convenient, as an option within any document or deck you’re already working on. All you’ve gotta do is (a) realize it’s there and available to you and (b) learn how to best take advantage of the new powers it affords you.

Here’s your start-to-finish guide.

Part I: Google Pics for Docs and Slides image editing

First things first, to find Pics, you’ll need to either have an individual Google account with a paid Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription or be part of a Google Workspace organization with the Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, or Enterprise Plus plan.

Provided you fit the bill, just open up Docs or Slides like you normally would, then click on any image within your document or presentation and look for the “Edit” option beneath it. (Pics is a desktop-specific feature, at least for the moment, so you won’t find it in the Docs and Slides mobile apps.)

The “Edit” button beneath an image in Docs or Slides is your entry point to Google Pics editing.

JR Raphael / Foundry

With Pics in the picture, hovering your mouse over that option should reveal text that says “Edit this image with Pics.” And that’s where the Pics magic begins.

(If you don’t see that text, you’re either not on an account where Pics is available or the Pics update just hasn’t rolled out to you quite yet. Google says it’s in the midst of adding it onto all eligible accounts as we speak, so keep checking — it should show up soon.)

The Google Pics image editor lets you select and edit specific elements of any image.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Once you’re inside the Pics editor, you’ll see the system taking a moment to process the image and identify all of its elements. Then, after a few seconds, you’ll be able to hover your mouse over any specific area of the image to see a description of it — and be able to click to edit it in any way you want.

You can give Pics instructions for edits to different areas of your image.

JR Raphael / Foundry

From there, you can click onto any other areas to add instructions for additional edits — all using straightforward, plain-English language just describing what you want to see — then click the “Apply” button at the bottom to bring all your requests into action at the same time.

So you might, for instance, ask the system to change the color of one specific element, change the text in another area of an image, and change the background. You can even ask it to translate text within an image into another language, if you want. And you can make up to five requests at once and then handle them all simultaneously.

Pics will take a moment to process, with the length of that moment varying based on how many requests you made and how complex the edits within them were. In my experience, the delay is never more than a few to several seconds, but if you for any reason find yourself growing impatient, you can always hit Esc or click the minimize icon (two diagonal arrows facing each other) in the upper-right corner of the Pics interface to go back to your document and get notified when the work is done.

Once the processing is finished, you’ll see all your edits applied — and if you’re happy with how they turned out, you can then click “Replace image” to bring the new version of the image into your deck or document.

Pics will make all your edits at the same time and give you a single final result.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Not bad, right?

You can also use the plus icon in the box at the bottom of the screen to upload your own photos, which can then be used as reference points or elements within the image you’re working on.

Pics lets you upload your own photos to integrate into an image.

JR Raphael / Foundry

And all of that is still just scratching the surface of what Pics can accomplish.

Part II: Google Pics for new Workspace image creation

In addition to Pics’ in-project editing prowess, the system boasts some impressive powers for new image generation within the Google Workspace universe.

Somewhat oddly, this part of Pics isn’t integrated directly into Docs, Slides, or any other Workspace app. Rather, you have to open it manually by going to pics.new in a browser tab — which is especially head-scratching since both Docs and Slides have a “Generate an image” option within their “Insert” menus. That option opens up a similar but slightly less capable Gemini side panel instead. (Hey, it wouldn’t be a Google product if it didn’t have at least some manner of branding confusion!)

Once you get to the Pics generation interface, though, you’ll find yourself facing possibilities both new and familiar. On the surface, what you’re working with generally is a fairly standard Gemini prompt for image generation — the same sort of capability you’d get by opening Gemini directly or interacting with it in any of the approximately 7 gazillion places where Google has squeezed it in as an option.

The Pics generation interface looks a lot like any other Gemini prompt on the surface.

JR Raphael / Foundry

But critically, this image generation interface ties into the Workspace collaboration system. Click the person-shaped sharing icon directly next to your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the screen — or hit Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S, if you’d rather — and you can then work together with other people in real time (though only other Google accounts with Pics access will be able to actively modify an image; if an account doesn’t have full Pics access, it’ll be able to see the ongoing progress but not make any actual changes).

Pics’ native Workspace collaboration is a noteworthy superpower.

JR Raphael / Foundry

This Pics editor also has an added cropping mechanism, at the top of its screen, for easy adjustment of an image’s dimensions — though the tool quite literally does just crop based on what’s already present, without actually changing the image to work well within the new dimensions. That’s a surprising limitation that results in images not always looking right when you try to adjust their sizes.

Pics lets you adjust an image’s dimensions but only by cropping — which doesn’t always work well.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Another interesting element in this interface is Pics’ ability to give you multiple image results to choose from. It happens only when you ask for an edit in the main prompt box at the bottom of the screen — and, somewhat confusingly, only in this Pics interface and not in the version that comes up when you’re editing existing images within Docs and Slides. But given the unpredictability of AI image editing, it’s a sensible way to increase your odds of ending up with something you like.

You can choose from different versions of an edit, but only in the Pics interface for creating new images.

JR Raphael / Foundry

This Pics interface also has a Docs-like “Version history” section — hidden away somewhat within an innocuous downward-facing caret icon next to your image’s name. It’s a handy way to keep track of edits and revert to an earlier version of an image, if such a need ever arises.

Docs-style version history is a handy touch in the Pics image generator.

JR Raphael / Foundry

From here, there’s no way to directly insert an image you create into any document or presentation. Instead, you simply export an image onto your computer for use wherever you want, or use the icon in the upper-right corner of the screen to copy it onto your system clipboard for later pasting.

You can also, I discovered, access all of your Pics edits and creations by going to the URL docs.google.com/images — which doesn’t seem to be present in any of the other Workspace app menus, strangely, but is technically there and available if you know how to find it.

Pics has a weirdly hidden home page where you can find all your edits and creations.

JR Raphael / Foundry

All in all, Google Pics is a useful, if somewhat disjointed, addition to the Workspace suite of productivity services. It’d make more sense as a simple feature within Docs and Slides — with both editing and new image creation existing as fully integrated options in those environments and without the befuddling branding that isn’t quite needed in this context. But that’s Google for ya, right? (And if the past is any indication, Pics will probably change names and/or merge into other apps at least 47 times over the next few years.)

What ultimately matters is what this technology can accomplish — and for anyone working within Docs and Slides and dealing with images without the luxury of a dedicated art department, it’s a welcome new tool and one well worth getting in the habit of using.

Related reading:

• Try Google Drive Projects for fast, focused AI analysis
• How to build your own AI agents with Google Workspace Studio
• A beginner’s guide to Google Gemini Gems
• Google NotebookLM cheat sheet: Get fast insights into your docs
• More Google Workspace tips and tutorials

Apple’s recently introduced MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR introduces a tandem OLED display and, for the first time, a touch interface. I discussed the approach Apple took to designing its new pro laptop with Apple’s Vice President of Mac and iPad Product Marketing, Tom Boger, which you can read here.

What follows is a little more information on some of the product features people are asking about, along with my first impressions of interacting with the display.

How the panel is made

The PROLED XDR display is made of 50 layers that total less than one millimeter. It’s a single sheet of glass carrying more than 100 million thin film transistors, arranged in 15 layers under 10 microns thick. The tandem OLED layers sit on top of this: two stacks making up 30 layers, each between a few nanometers and a few hundred nanometers thick.

Apple wanted to make the display as thin as possible, because a thin display delivers much better performance and the company wanted to optimize the OLED technology. Apple took great pains in building this; it even worked with its display supplier to simulate how OLED molecules evaporate onto the glass and to track each layer’s thickness as it comes off the line. 

It was interesting to learn that the panels are made on giant sheets of “mother glass,” with about eighty 14-inch panels per sheet. The final layers add mechanical, electrical and thermal benefits, with optical adhesive and a cover glass with anti-reflective and fingerprint-resistant coatings placed on top.

One industry observer I spoke with remarked that these high-end display fabrication factories are massive, the size of football stadiums, with the most extreme needs for clean-room suits and high-tech protection. 

What this means for the display

The up to 2,000 nits display delivers stunning clarity with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It supports P3, Adobe RGB, DICOM and more, and shows colors at reference quality, something once reserved for monitors costing around $30,000. (Anyone who ever used an Apple Pro Display XDR will know how transformative that product was on introduction).

The display engine in the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips used in the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR is very powerful. It controls the color and luminance of every pixel in real time, which is why it can deliver precise color accuracy. To achieve this, it adjusts each pixel at sub-millisecond speed, and refresh rates run adaptively from 10Hz to 120Hz.

It even monitors and adapts to how each pixel is used, to prolong the panel’s life. If you opt for nanotexture glass, which many pros will do, that is literally etched into the cover glass. With or without nanotexture, the displays share the same fingerprint-resistant coating.

How touch works on the display

The touch sensors are built directly into the display layer rather than being added as a separate layer. This shows in the zero latency you experience when you touch something on-screen. 

Touch makes laptop lids wobble, so Apple redesigned the hinge to reduce that wobble. I found out there’s even a word for such a wobble: the time a screen takes to settle after being touched is called “ring down.” 

Anecdotally, at least, I gave the display several strong pokes, and it stopped moving very swiftly. Of course, when you make a video call you don’t want to look like you are moving once you poke the display, which is why the company developed an AI to deliver video stabilization to take the shake away.

Compared to other leading touch-enabled laptops with OLED displays, Apple’s seems to deliver higher peak brightness, better shadow and highlight detail, less color shift at off-angles, and a more stable screen when touched.

What about the operating system?

Apple has done the work, so developers don’t have to. That’s why macOS converts touch into clicks automatically. That’s also why system menus automatically expand when touched so small controls are easier to tap. 

This stuff is built into the OS, so developers don’t have to do too much to support touch on a Mac. Some developers will need to, but for most apps, most of the time, touch is as simple as the trackpad.  New gesture APIs on macOS support deeper optimization, but you won’t need to spend money on touch-enabled versions of Mac apps.

Pinch-to-zoom and panning work when you touch the display, but you don’t have to do so, as the keyboard and trackpad continue to work just like they always have For accessibility, you’ll find full-screen zoom, stylus support (though not Apple Pencil), and the option to turn touch off entirely.

What is it like with pro apps?

I didn’t get too long with the Mac, but I can confirm a few features for some apps:

• You can grab and rotate objects in Pixelmator Pro.
• Logic Pro has an on-screen keyboard and step sequencer. 
• And if you use Xcode, you can now test iOS and iPadOS apps on the Mac’s touchscreen.

Of course, all those features rely on touch, but the processor inside these Macs is also extremely powerful. I’ve not tested this, but Apple has claimed that prompt processing for local language models (which matters for agentic coding workflows) is up to 12 times faster on the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips than on the M1 Pro and M1 Max.

What it all means

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR may support touch, but to some extent this is less important than the power and performance it delivers, and its reference-grade, bright display. Color-critical creators stand to gain the most, but anyone who works with visuals will notice the difference.

Pre-orders opened October 28 in 30 countries and regions, with deliveries from today, November 6. US prices start at $2,899 for the 14-inch M5 Pro and rise to $4,799 for the 16-inch M5 Max. I don’t have one, which makes me sad — though hop over here for a short tour of the first product reviews. 

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