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Hybrid work has driven a surge in Active Directory password resets, turning minor lockouts into major productivity drains. Specops shows why remote access, cached credentials, and security policies are fueling the spike. [...]

Z bezpilotních letounů se už stala běžná spotřební elektronika • I ta nejmenší kvadrokoptéra s kamerou ale podléhá regulaci • Trh s rekreačními drony dnes ovládá DJI. Zaslouženě

Most of this week’s threats didn’t rely on new tricks. They relied on familiar systems behaving exactly as designed, just in the wrong hands. Ordinary files, routine services, and trusted workflows were enough to open doors without forcing them. What stands out is how little friction attackers now need. Some activity focused on quiet reach and coverage, others on timing and reuse. The emphasis Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft is rolling out new artificial intelligence features with the latest updates to the Notepad and Paint apps for Windows 11 Insiders. [...]

ChatGPT brzy začne testovat reklamy v odpovědích. • Gemini se tímto směrem nevydá, AI zatím bude bez inzerce. • Jeho provoz už ale reklama živí, byť nepřímo.

Regulators logged over 400 personal data breach notifications a day for first time since law came into force

GDPR fines pushed past the £1 billion (€1.2 billion) mark in 2025 as Europe's regulators were deluged with more than 400 data breach notifications a day, according to a new survey that suggests the post-plateau era of enforcement has well and truly arrived.…

Mind the cyber gap – similar flaws highlighted multiple years in a row

Concerned about the orgs that safeguard your money? The UK's annual cybersecurity review for 2025 suggests you should be. Despite years of regulation, financial organizations continue to miss basic cybersecurity safeguards.…

Svobodný operační systém ReactOS (Wikipedie), jehož cílem je kompletní binární kompatibilita s aplikacemi a ovladači pro Windows, slaví 30. narozeniny.

Work-from-office mandates are accelerating as the world moves further away from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the push toward in-person work environments will make it more difficult for IT leaders to retain and recruit staff, some experts say.

Over the past year, many companies, including IT giants Amazon and Microsoft, have required employees to work from the office, with many other organizations mandating on-site work in previous years.

Nearly half of all workers, and nearly two-thirds of IT professionals, were feeling pressure from their employers to work from the office as of early 2025, according to the 2025 Technology at Work Report, released by IT security firm Ivanti.

Advocates of in-person work expect increased productivity and improved collaboration as employees work from the office, although several studies have suggested that workers can be just as productive when working remotely, and employment experts say collaboration gains can be difficult to measure.

There is value in cross-functional teams working together in person, says Lawrence Wolfe, CTO at marketing firm Converge. “When teams meet for architecture sessions, design sprints, or incident response, the pace of progress, as well as the level of clarity, may increase simply because being in-person caters to the way most people in the business interact,” he says.

However, there are potential downsides for IT leaders, with strict work-from-office policies making it more difficult to attract and retain top IT talent. “In addition to resistance, there would also be the risk of talent turnover,” Wolfe adds. “The truth is, both physical and virtual collaboration provide tremendous value.”

IT workers value flexibility

Ivanti’s survey suggests that IT workers are skeptical of return-to-office (RTO) mandates. Eighty-three percent of IT workers surveyed say flexible work arrangements are either “high value” or “essential,” compared to 73% of office workers.

Meanwhile, IT workers facing work-from-office mandates are two to three times more likely than their counterparts to look for new jobs, according to Metaintro, a search engine that tracks millions of jobs.

IT leaders hiring new employees may also face significant headwinds, with it taking 40% to 50% longer to fill in-person roles than remote jobs, according to Metaintro.

“Some of the challenges CIOs face include losing top-tier talent, limiting the pool of candidates available for hire, and damaging company culture, with a team filled with resentment,” says Lacey Kaelani, CEO and cofounder at Metaintro.

Despite possible resistance, it makes sense for some IT jobs to be tied to an office, says Lena McDearmid, founder and CEO of culture and leadership advisory firm Wryver. Some IT roles, including device provisioning, network operations, and conference room IT support, are better done in person, she notes.

She sees some other benefits in specific situations. “In-person work is genuinely valuable for onboarding and mentoring early-career technologists, especially when learning how the organization actually operates, not just how the codebase works,” McDearmid says. “It’s also powerful when teams need to think together in high-bandwidth ways: whiteboards, war rooms, architecture reviews, incident response, or when solving messy, cross-functional problems.”

Presence alone doesn’t create value

There is weaker evidence that blanket in-office mandates improve day-to-day productivity across all IT roles, she adds.

“Many technologists, especially engineers, data scientists, and architects doing deep, complex work, often perform better in controlled environments with fewer interruptions,” McDearmid says. “In those cases, presence alone doesn’t create value. Purpose does.”

Effective collaboration can happen remotely when teams have clear norms, strong documentation, and psychological safety, she adds. “I’ve also seen teams sitting next to each other collaborate poorly because decisions are unclear or leaders equate visibility with progress,” she says. “Collaboration doesn’t automatically improve just because people share a building.”

There are several downsides for IT leaders to in-person work mandates, McDearmid adds, as orders to commute to an office can feel arbitrary or rooted in control rather than in value creation. “That erodes trust quickly, particularly in IT teams that proved they could deliver remotely for years,” she adds.

The mandates can also create new friction for IT leaders by requiring them to deal with morale issues, manage exceptions, and spend time enforcing policy instead of leading strategy, she says.

“There’s also a real risk of losing experienced, high-performing talent who have options and are unwilling to trade autonomy for proximity without a clear reason,” McDearmid adds. “When companies mandate daily commutes without a clear rationale, they often narrow their talent pool and increase attrition, particularly among people who know they can work effectively elsewhere.”

Instead of asking how they can get people to work from the office, successful CIOs focus on what types of work are better when employees are together and how to intentionally plan for those scenarios, McDearmid says.

“When return-to-office is aligned to real value creation, teams usually understand it,” she adds. “When it isn’t, it shows up quickly in engagement and retention.”

Focus on outcomes

IT leaders facing commute-to-office mandates should focus on data that measures work outcomes, not badge swipes, adds Rebecca Wettemann, CEO at IT analyst firm Valoir. CIOs can help IT teams by enabling them to automate repetitive works so they can focus on measurable outputs, she adds.

IT leaders enforcing in-person work mandates can also focus on making the workplace a real place to collaborate, she adds. CIOs can align office space, meeting schedules, and in-office days so they reinforce the goals of collaboration and knowledge sharing, Wettemann adds.

CIOs should look for ways to remove friction from the workplace through automation, should allow for flexibility, and should communicate how work-from-office policies are data-driven, she says.

“The real danger is when RTO is a corporate mandate that isn’t aligned with the realities of the workplace, or even worse, when it’s being used as a Band-Aid for poor management,” Wettemann says. “When IT professionals feel they’re being evaluated based on badge swipes, not real accomplishments, they will either act accordingly or look to work elsewhere.”

This story originally appeared on CIO.com.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants Europe to rethink its stance on data sovereignty just as AI systems become more deeply embedded across global business. His message: Europe may be obsessing over “where” data lives, while missing the more consequential question of “who ultimately benefits” from the intelligence derived from it.

“I think sovereignty requires real thought on what it is. Control of destiny means that your ability to produce something that is unique is preserved,” Nadella told BlackRock CEO Larry Fink during a fireside chat at the sidelines of the annual meet in Davos, organized by the World Economic Forum.

Responding to Fink’s question on whether Europe had misunderstood data sovereignty as a concept, Nadella argued that true sovereignty has little to do with data localization or geographic boundaries.

Instead, the CEO framed the real risk as unintentional “leakage” of intelligence — the insights, patterns, and institutional knowledge derived from enterprise data — into third-party AI models or external entities.

In Nadella’s view, such leakage can occur even under the strictest data residency regimes.

He implied that Europe’s regulatory emphasis may be misaligned with the realities of AI-driven value creation.

To that extent, Nadella said that he believes European enterprises would be better served, at least in terms of global competitiveness, by protecting their “tacit knowledge” rather than doubling down on compliance frameworks that govern storage but not downstream intelligence reuse.

Done right, he suggested, this shift could help European firms remain globally competitive rather than insulated but strategically constrained.

Clever corporate speak?

Analysts, however, agree with only part of Nadella’s narrative.

Stephanie Walter, practice leader for the AI stack at HyperFRAME Research, said Nadella is right about gauging sovereignty, especially in an AI-driven economy, as less about data localization and more about who controls enterprise intelligence being absorbed into models. Enterprises need to consider whether they have designed AI systems that allow them to evolve, audit, and repurpose their enterprise intelligence independently of any single vendor, Walter added.

At the same time, Walter cautioned that Nadella’s reframing is far from neutral and conveniently aligns with the strengths and commercial interests of hyperscale cloud providers like Microsoft.

If sovereignty is no longer defined primarily by geography, Microsoft is no longer cast as a sovereignty risk, but as a sovereignty enabler, Walter noted.

Further, the analyst sees Nadella’s framing benefiting all hyperscalers.

“If sovereignty is defined less by where workloads run and more by who controls models, data flows, and governance, then global platforms with deep AI, data, and security stacks become the default foundation. Hyperscalers are well-positioned here because they can argue that customers retain control through encryption, customer-managed keys, model deployment choices, and enterprise governance without fragmenting infrastructure by region,” Walter said.

Huff and puff over past regulatory hurdles

Nadella’s comments are more likely a response to long-running tension between European regulatory priorities and hyperscaler operating models, one that has repeatedly put Microsoft under pressure, said Shelly DeMotte Kramer, principal analyst at Kramer & Company.

In recent years, the company has faced mounting scrutiny from the European Commission, including a formal antitrust investigation into its decision to bundle Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365.

Separately, the EU has also examined whether Microsoft’s cloud and productivity dominance creates structural lock-in for enterprises.

Beyond antitrust, Microsoft has repeatedly come under pressure in Europe over cloud practices and data governance.

European privacy watchdogs have previously ruled that the European Commission’s own use of Microsoft 365 violated EU data-protection rules, underscoring broader concerns about where data flows and who ultimately controls it.

Also, rivals have amplified regulatory scrutiny on Microsoft, with Google publicly criticizing Microsoft’s cloud licensing practices in Europe as anti-competitive.

Kramer also questioned the timing of Nadella’s comments, calling it “somewhat laughable” given the broader geopolitical and regulatory context in the US.

The analyst argued that Nadella’s call for Europe to prioritize global competitiveness over protectionism risks being seen as tone-deaf, as the US is prioritizing self-preservation, not open global competition, by taking a highly protectionist approach to technology, AI, and supply chains related to chip-making.

More so because Europe is increasingly wary of its dependence on US-controlled cloud infrastructure, Kramer said, adding that current EU regulations have been framed and are being implemented in a manner that aims at moving control inside its geographic boundaries.

Oživeno 21. 1. 2026 | autor: Petr Urban Edge 144 přináší spoustu novinek, ale jedna z nich vyčnívá. Některé titulky hlásí, že teď můžete skrýt tlačítko Copilotu na panelu nástrojů, jako by šlo o novinku. Já bych ale přísahal, že tohle tlačítko šlo schovat už dřív. Nespletl jsem se. Na jednom svém ...

Hackers collect $439,250 after exploiting 29 zero-day vulnerabilities on the second day of Pwn2Own Automotive 2026. [...]

Critical vuln flew under the radar for a decade

A recently disclosed critical vulnerability in the GNU InetUtils telnet daemon (telnetd) is "trivial" to exploit, experts say.…

Fortinet FortiGate devices are being targeted in automated attacks that create rogue accounts and steal firewall configuration data, according to cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf. [...]

Po dvou děravých sluchátkách teď Sony vyrobilo klipové náušnice. • LinkBuds Clip jdou po cestě vyšlapané JBL nebo Huawei. • Slibují dobrý zvuk, pohodlí a dlouhou výdrž.

Security teams at agile, fast-growing companies often have the same mandate: secure the business without slowing it down. Most teams inherit a tech stack optimized for breakneck growth, not resilience. In these environments, the security team is the helpdesk, the compliance expert, and the incident response team all rolled into one. Securing the cloud office in this scenario is all about [email protected]

Forgive me, but I’m starting to get a teensy bit weary of The Future™.

Surely you can relate — right? Every week lately, it seems, we’re being bombarded with some new form of AI razzle-dazzle and being told how it’s a zillion times better than the last game-changing innovation and, like, totally gonna revolutionize the way we work.

And yet — well, I don’t know about you, but thus far, most of it hasn’t exactly blown my mind.

Generative AI at this point has been a lot of promise and a lot of “kinda-sorta helpful, maybe?” results. So far, most of the hype hasn’t quite matched the reality, and the high likelihood of a large-language-model-powered system confidently telling you something inaccurate — or even just missing important context around its certain-seeming assertions — is a pretty big liability to accept, particularly in a corporate environment (but honestly, even just in your own day-to-day doings).

So when Google quietly launched another new AI assistant ahead of the holidays, my skepticism meter immediately skyrocketed. But this one looked different. It looked intriguingly familiar, in fact. And it sounded like it might be an effective recipe for putting this rapidly developing technology to use in an environment that actually makes sense — and might lay the groundwork for the genuinely helpful on-demand assistant we’ve all been waiting to meet.

This latest AI-centric creation is called CC, and it’s described as an “AI productivity agent.” Unlike Google’s everywhere-you-look Gemini AI assistant, CC lives entirely in your inbox — within Gmail, specifically — and attempts to work proactively on your behalf in addition to serving as an on-demand info wrangler.

It’s an interestingly different approach and one that immediately reminded me of a short-lived Android-based system from over a decade ago — something that still stands out in my mind as the yet-to-be-matched gold standard for how proactive intelligence should work. And, luckily, I was able to get my hands on this new invention and spend the past several weeks seeing what it’s all about.

Getting to know Google CC

First things first: When you gain access to Google CC in Gmail — available as of now in an early access, waitlist-only setup, limited to individual (non-company-connected) Google accounts in the US and Canada with paid Google AI plans — nothing much changes.

There’s no grand entrance of a glimmering virtual genie, and no new icons or animations or sparkly colors appear anywhere in or around your inbox. You just get an email — and that’s it.

But that email might make you stand up, metaphorically speaking, and take notice — because, at least in my experience, it’s anything but generic.

My welcome email immediately showed how CC taps into your existing Google data to learn all sorts of facts about you, for better or maybe sometimes for worse, and then puts those pieces together to provide extremely personalized communications and suggestions for planning out your days. Specifically, within its third sentence, my CC agent casually mentioned a couple of very accurate but maybe slightly too personal things that it had gleaned from my past communications:

Google CC pulls in personal info to help inform its suggestions — but without human judgment, it doesn’t always know what’s appropriate or likely to be appreciated.

JR Raphael / Foundry

The line between helpful and creepy is a slippery one at times, particularly when it comes to an automated system seemingly knowing things about you on a personal level. For me, the flippant-feeling mention of my mother’s passing went a touch too far and felt like a slight violation, or at least an instance of a non-human algorithm not understanding context or being able to grasp the subtleties of communication.

As for where CC learns about you, it dips into your activity within Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive for its background and then combines that with info from around the web to give you a daily briefing in your inbox each morning. That’s its main function, really, though it also has an on-demand element that we’ll explore in a moment.

But as far as the daily briefing goes, that’s where I can’t help but think of a little something called Google Now. Launched in the summer of 2012, Now was an ahead-of-its-time concept that brought a stream of proactive info onto your Android phone’s home screen — drawing from your location, your typical activity, and your Google account data to figure out exactly what info you might need when and then serve it up to you before you ever asked for it.

That’s almost exactly what CC attempts to do — though, ironically, without all the same data behind it and with a less prophetic-feeling result.

The daily CC briefings

More than anything (and outside of the unfortunate family death mention at the onset), my daily Google CC emails have consisted of:

• Summaries and details about events on my calendar for the coming day
• A list of tasks taken from incoming emails — things like bills to pay, documents to sign, proposals to review, and software hiccups to investigate
• A series of reminders also collected from emails about things like upcoming events, retail offers, incoming order shipments, and impersonal PR pitches

The Google CC briefings hold a mix of information both relevant and awkwardly inconsequential.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Occasionally, the digests have picked up on something I might’ve otherwise overlooked — like a payment due on an insurance policy that had typically been on auto-pay (meaning I barely even glanced at the email that arrived about it) but had for some reason been switched off that status at the start of 2026. On other occasions, they’ve dug into emails and helpfully pulled together bulleted info about upcoming events that I hadn’t thought about in some time — for instance, showing the current costs and benefits of a tech protection subscription that was about to expire so I could think through if and when I wanted to renew it.

But just as often, the system has shown me info that’s fallen somewhere between irrelevant and just plain puzzling. More than anything, it’s painfully apparent the technology is lacking any real perspective on what matters to me and why — so it’ll frequently surface spammy-seeming things that I’d otherwise ignore and present them as if they’re critical knowledge for my day, whether that’s calling out an automated “business loan offer” that landed in my inbox at some point or flagging some unimportant software setup as a top-of-mind, very important item just because a random company whose app I don’t even use sent me a message about it.

As an individual person using this with my own independent inbox (one that combines business and personal emails but that isn’t connected to any broader corporate entity) — and as someone who’s especially on alert and viewing this with a critical eye — it’s easy enough for me to separate the actually relevant info from the context-lacking randomness. But it’s also easy to imagine this presenting some very serious challenges if it were to eventually make its way into a more enterprise-level environment, as noted in a Computerworld analysis published around the time of the feature’s launch:

“Analysts warn that the very compression that makes these tools attractive can introduce subtle risks. Summaries inevitably strip away nuance, and prioritization logic encodes assumptions that may not align with how decisions are actually made inside an organization.”

Looking at examples like my misinterpreted business loan reminder or inapplicable software setup nudge, I can envision this exact sort of quandary if the same sorts of scenarios were to arise in a more complex company context — with someone seeing an important-seeming reminder about something they aren’t familiar with and don’t immediately recognize as irrelevant and then taking steps to follow through on that suggestion.

Even so, I’ve found myself surprised by how much I look forward to opening each morning’s CC email. At this point in my time with the service, it’s proven to be interesting to see what it surfaces and to get a tidy day-ahead summary in a place where I’m already starting my morning, anyway — even if I know a fair portion of what it tells me will be of little to no real consequence.

And that’s still just half of the Google CC experience.

Google CC on demand

The other part of using CC — and one I haven’t found myself tapping into often  — is the ability to interact with CC and reply to any of its emails — or even just email the service separate from any incoming missive — to ask it questions and make custom requests. But my limited use of those features isn’t for a lack of trying.

A few days into my Google CC adventure, I emailed CC to ask exactly what it could do on that front and how I could best take advantage of its interactive potential, and within a matter of seconds, the system responded with a list of easy-to-follow suggestions — even personalizing its text to pull in specific names and scenarios it had found in my emails:

In addition to its proactive emails, Google CC works as an on-demand assistant in your inbox — if you want to engage with it in that way.

JR Raphael / Foundry

I tried some of those suggestions, and they absolutely did work as promised (well, mostly — asking it to draft a reply or new email on my behalf ended up feeling like more work than just writing the thing myself, given how long it took to type out the prompt and then rework CC’s suggestion so it actually made sense and sounded like me). But I couldn’t help but ponder when and why I would actually want to interact with an agent over email in that way.

First, there’s the fact that it just feels weird to be chatting with an AI agent by sending and receiving regular ol’ emails. We’ve been conditioned to expect these systems to show up when we hit a specific button or open up a panel of some sort, and having the system be positioned as another run-of-the-mill contact in your inbox is somehow slightly odd (even having interacted with Gemini in a text messaging app before). Maybe it’s the lack of immediacy followed by the sudden appearance of a human-like reply, but for whatever reason, it seems more unnatural to correspond back and forth with a bot in this way.

Then there’s the fact that Gemini itself is already thoroughly integrated into Gmail and available to perform those same on-demand functions right there in my inbox — and that’s to say nothing of the same system’s integration into Chrome, at the browser level, mere pixels above the inbox view. It comes across as strangely redundant, though it does also seem in line with Google’s goal to stick this sort of AI technology everywhere imaginable.

AI everywhere: the overwhelming redundancy of CC’s on-demand abilities and the same sorts of suggestions from Gemini all throughout Gmail — and beyond.

JR Raphael / Foundry

On a related note, just this month, Google previewed a new AI-in-Gmail function called AI Inbox — which relies on, yes, AI to organize your emails and offer up at-a-glance summaries of your (allegedly) most pressing messages and the tasks within ’em. It doesn’t incorporate info from Calendar and Drive, like CC does, nor does it have the more on-demand elements that CC pulls into the equation. But it feels kind of like where CC might ultimately be headed, if and when the two converge.

Still, it’s important to remember that CC is an “early Labs experiment,” so some of these rough edges and awkward juxtapositions are probably to be expected. As of now, we don’t even know if or when it’ll graduate into a full-fledged, widely available feature or anything that’s offered on the more company-centric Google Workspace side of the spectrum.

For the moment, CC presents a potpourri of potential that feels equal parts promising and problematic. The big question is how it’ll evolve and what it’ll look like in its final form (assuming, of course, that it doesn’t get brushed aside and abandoned somewhere along the way). That’s the question that’ll determine if CC ends up being a place where this type of artificial intelligence feels appropriate and advantageous or just another area where it’s being forced onto us with questionable practical value.

And that, so far, is a question that even CC itself can’t effectively answer. Believe me: I tried.

The critical-rated flaw leaves unpatched systems open to full takeover

Cisco has finally shipped a fix for a critical-rated zero-day in its Unified Communications gear, a flaw that's already being weaponized in the wild, and which CISA previously flagged as an emergency priority.…

Satelitní internetová síť Amazon Leo (dříve Kuiper) roste jako z vody a na oběžné dráze zhruba 500 kilometrů nad Zemí už má v provozu 180 družic. A přestože Leo zatím nenabízí služby komerčním zákazníkům, už se mluví o dalším systému ze stáje Jeffa Bezose. Blue Origin se totiž pochlubil plány na ...