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Six-hour breach turned trusted links into a coin toss between legit tools and credential stealers

Visitors to the CPUID website were briefly exposed to malware this week after attackers hijacked part of its backend, turning trusted download links into a delivery mechanism for something far less welcome.…

Amazon končí podporu nejstarších čteček e-knih. • Na Kindlech z let 2007 až 2012 již nepůjde kupovat a stahovat knihy. • Nestanou se z nich těžítka, soubory do nich půjde nahrávat ručně.

Microsoft Windows Insider members will soon have an easy way to select which new features they test. Until now, Windows Insiders have had to wait for Microsoft to randomly assign them news features for testing through its Controlled Feature Rollout program or enable the features themselves through third-party software such as ViVeTool.

The new Windows setting, Feature Flags, will be a boon for administrators of Microsoft products who want to get a handle on the innovations relevant to their enterprise. Microsoft has not officially announced the new functionality, but an eagle-eyed user spotted the Feature Flags setting buried in the latest Windows Insider software build.

Microsoft Windows design and research leader Marcus Ash responded congratulating the spotter on their speed, adding that he would be “Excited to share more about WIP settings next week.”

He followed that up with a post to a Microsoft blog that changes were on the way, saying that users will “ have more control” over features they care about.

The Windows Insiders who wish to delve into the new settings are out of luck for now: They are not enabled yet. But messages contained in the latest build of the software say “these features are still in development and may change” and that “turning them on or off could affect performance or stability.”

So, while there are plenty of hints about the forthcoming release, users will still have to wait for an official announcement from Microsoft and there is no indication as to when that will be.

Meta Platforms is reportedly pulling top software engineers from across the company into a newly created AI unit on a mandatory basis, with the stated goal of eventually having autonomous agents perform the bulk of the work of building, testing, and shipping its products, and human engineers serving only to monitor them.

The development was based on an internal company memo authored by Maher Saba, a vice president in Meta’s Reality Labs division and a longtime associate of Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who leads the new Applied AI (AAI) Engineering organization, reported Reuters. According to the report, Saba created AAI last month and initially sought volunteers to join. This week, he told selected employees their transfers are no longer a choice.

“AAI is one of the company’s highest priorities and we’re resourcing it by moving our strongest talent to address it. Therefore, the transfers aren’t optional,” Saba wrote in the memo, the report added.

The unit’s mandate goes significantly beyond building AI productivity tools. According to the memo AAI’s stated end goal is for autonomous AI agents to perform the bulk of the work required to build, test, and ship Meta’s products and infrastructure with human engineers monitoring rather than executing.

Gartner predicts that AI agents will require 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill by 2027, and separately forecasts that 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by year-end 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025.

“Meta’s move signals that AI is now being fundamentally positioned within engineering as a core execution infrastructure, rather than just as a productivity layer,” said Ishi Thakur, senior analyst at Everest Group. “Competitive advantage will hinge less on access to models and more on how deeply organizations can embed AI into real-world engineering workflows.”

But analysts caution that the path there is far from straightforward. “For Meta-scale firms, agent-led engineering is achievable only in tightly scoped domains today,” said Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “Before reducing hands-on developer responsibility, enterprises must establish robust evaluation harnesses, policy-as-code controls, deterministic build pipelines, and explicit human escalation paths.”

What AAI is building

AAI will work alongside Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, headed by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, to build what Saba described as “the data engine that helps our models get better, faster,” according to the report. The organization consists of two teams: one focused on interfaces and tooling, and a second responsible for executing tasks, generating data, and providing evaluations that feed back to Meta’s modeling teams.

“This reflects a growing belief that traditional management layers will become less relevant as AI absorbs coordination and execution tasks,” said Thakur. “Value is concentrated in high-skill individual contributors augmented by AI.”

Dai cautioned that the structure carries significant governance risk. “If provenance tracking, gated approvals, and automated security testing are not mandatory, AI-generated code can overwhelm oversight and erode accountability for quality, compliance, and audits,” he said.

On Meta’s Q4 2025 earnings call in January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 2026 would be “the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work.” Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said on the same call that output per engineer had already risen 30% since the start of 2025, driven largely by AI coding agents, with power users recording an 80% year-over-year productivity increase.

For Meta, AAI is the next step in embedding that trajectory deeper into its engineering infrastructure.

Workforce reductions ongoing

Separately, Meta has been reducing its overall headcount in 2026. The company has already cut approximately 10% of its Reality Labs division in January, affecting around 1,000 employees, and laid off several hundred more in late March across recruiting, sales, global operations, and Facebook social teams.

Meta’s capital expenditure for 2026 is projected between $115 billion and $135 billion, nearly double its 2025 spend, driven by investments in data centers, chips, and AI infrastructure. The company formalized that infrastructure drive with the launch of Meta Compute, consolidating its global data center and network operations under a single leadership structure.

“The dominant barrier is organizational,” said Dai. “Enterprises have not yet redefined ownership, incentives, and liability when software is produced by agents. Until accountability frameworks catch up, leadership caution will continue to slow adoption.”

Thakur put it plainly: “The real constraint is no longer technological capability, but whether organizations can evolve their operating models fast enough to responsibly absorb this level of autonomy.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A financially motivated threat actor tracked as Storm-2755 is stealing Canadian employees' salary payments after hijacking their accounts in payroll pirate attacks. [...]

In the first quarter of 2026, 65.6 million PCs were sold worldwide, according to data released this week by IDC. That represents a 2.5% increase compared to the same quarter a year ago. The research firm attributed the increase to customers moving to buy PCs now ahead of expected significant price hikes.

The fact that computer sales are rising despite the uncertain global situation and a worldwide shortage of RAM is seen as a positive sign, but the industry faces uncertainty in the months ahead.

“The conflict in the Middle East has introduced a new layer of volatility to the fragile computer market, which is weighing on global logistics with a double-edged sword of rising energy and transportation costs,” Isaac Ngatia, senior research analyst, IDC Devices Research, said in a statement.

As usual, Lenovo, HP, and Dell were the top PC sellers, followed by Apple and Asus. The latter accounted for the largest increase — specifically, up 17.1%.

Just what FOSS developers need – a flood of AI-discovered vulnerabilities

Opinion  Anthropic describes Project Glasswing as a coalition of tech giants committing $100 million in AI resources to hunt down and fix long-hidden vulnerabilities in critical open source software that it's finding with its new Mythos AI program. Or as The Reg put it, "an AI model that can generate zero-day vulnerabilities."…

Four-week call for evidence intended to help shape laws aimed at devices linked to crime

The UK government is seeking views on radiofrequency jammers as it prepares legislation to ban the controversial devices.…

While much of the discussion on AI security centers around protecting ‘shadow’ AI and GenAI consumption, there's a wide-open window nobody's guarding: AI browser extensions.  A new report from LayerX exposes just how deep this blind spot goes, and why AI extensions may be the most dangerous AI threat surface in your network that isn't on anyone's [email protected]

ChatGPT Pro můžete mít za 2490 Kč nebo 4990 Kč měsíčně. • Tarify se liší v limitech agentní funkce Codex. • V ostatních ohledech jsou stejné.

Google says Gmail end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is now available on all Android and iOS devices, allowing enterprise users to read and compose emails without additional tools. [...]

Čínská společnost Norinco vyvíjí autonomní nákladní dron Changying-8, který je největší na světě, pokud jako měřítko použijeme oficiální maximální vzletovou hmotnost 7 tun. Rekordní letoun před pár dny zvládl svůj první let v Čeng-čou ve střední Číně. Podle ohlasů jde o významný milník budování ...

Chytrá váha české značky Salente SlimFit zlevnila na 311 Kč. • Měří 15 parametrů a data pošle do mobilu i bez cloudu. • Údaje umí synchronizovat s ekosystémy Apple Zdraví a Google Health Connect.

Cut through the noise and understand the real risks, responsibilities, and responses shaping enterprise AI today.

Webinar Promo  2025 was the year of AI experimentation. In 2026, the bills are coming due. AI adoption has moved from isolated pilots to autonomous, enterprise wide deployment, bringing with it a sophisticated new generation of security challenges.…

Pokud dojde na téma napájení procesorů a energetický limit PL2, objevují se stále názory, že navýšení spotřeby nad TDP, je krátkodobé, časově omezené. To však již 5 let neplatí…

Google has made Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) generally available to all Windows users of its Chrome web browser, months after it began testing the security feature in open beta. The public availability is currently limited to Windows users on Chrome 146, with macOS expansion planned in an upcoming Chrome release. "This project represents a significant Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A critical security vulnerability in Marimo, an open-source Python notebook for data science and analysis, has been exploited within 10 hours of public disclosure, according to findings from Sysdig. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-39987 (CVSS score: 9.3), a pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability impacting all versions of Marimo prior to and including Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time offline. And not by choice. That’s why I love new tools that work offline like the great one Google just launched. 

I know, I’m an outlier. As a full-time digital nomad who travels constantly, I have unusual connectivity problems. Right now, I’m living on a farm in Tuscany. It’s amazing. I love it. But for two days recently, the connectivity got so bad I could barely work. There was little I could do except drink Chianti and gaze at the rolling green hills. (On Easter Sunday and the day after — a local day off — everybody was at home stressing their internet connections, which made connectivity close to impossible.)

I often find myself in this position. My wife and I tend to favor old houses in old neighborhoods, usually in Europe or Latin America, and the connectivity can be bad to nonexistent. 

I lose connections while driving, while in or near very old stone buildings, while flying in airplanes, and while driving through remote areas. 

But even for people who don’t travel and move around like I do, being offline can also be a choice. It’s much more secure to disconnect, especially in public spaces like coffeeshops and airports and when using one of the many untrustworthy cloud-centric companies. Sometimes you need desperately to save battery life. Sometimes it can feel healthy psychologically to know you’re offline. 

Tools can and should work better offline. I have an expensive iPhone that would have been considered a supercomputer just 10 years ago. A modern smartphone is powerful enough to do a lot of the work that’s currently performed in the cloud. 

Cloud computing is necessary for chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini because all-purpose AI models require hundreds of billions of parameters, massive amounts of RAM, and huge amounts of electricity to be ready to do anything and everything very quickly. Forcing these workloads onto a mobile device fundamentally caps the intelligence and capability of general-purpose AI. But breaking down individual tasks (like transcription) doesn’t require massive data centers. 

The biggest problems for me are two of the tools I use most: MyMind and Lex. 

I wrote about MyMind in August. It’s a lifelogging, bookmarking, remember-everything tool that makes it very fast at recalling information. It uses AI to auto-tag and takes the work out of both saving and recalling information. 

Unfortunately, without a connection, I lose MyMind. It simply has no offline capability. So when I’m disconnected and want to save or recall something, I can’t. The more I rely on this prosthetic memory tool, the more being offline gives me amnesia. This is my biggest complaint about MyMind. 

I’ve also told you about Lex. Lex is essentially a word processor with built-in AI tools designed not to write for you (and make you worse at writing), but instead to point things out and advise you in ways that make your writing better. 

Lex also doesn’t work offline. Which is a shame, because its major alternatives like Google Docs and Apple Pages do. You can simply use them offline, and later when you get a connection they sync to the cloud. Lex’s lack of offline support is the main reason I often think about cancelling my subscription and going back to Pages. (Note that I use a Bluetooth keyboard with my phone to do real writing of columns, newsletters, blog posts and even books.)

Both MyMind and Lex use AI and I expect that in the very near future we’ll see a shift away from all-purpose chatbots to smaller, special-purpose AI-based tools like these running on the edge or on our phones. 

One great example of this shift is a new tool from Google called AI Edge Eloquent. 

Talk to the handheld

Google launched its free, iOS-only, English-only offline dictation app on Monday. While dictation doesn’t sound very interesting, Google has built in several features that make it really great. 

Firstly, it uses AI, with Gemma-based speech recognition models running locally on the phone. It doesn’t just capture what you say, but what you meant to say. Which is to say that it ignores your ums and ahs and repetitions, capturing only the clean words you intended. (If you toggle on cloud processing, it works even better.) It’s very good at adding punctuation automatically. 

When you’re done talking, the app automatically loads the clean text to the clipboard. That means you can talk to the app, then just switch over to your word processor, social media app, email app or other app and simply paste in the results. 

The app can re-write your transcripts using one of four default style options: 

1. Key points (condenses speech into a bulleted list)
2. Formal (shifts the text into a professional tone)
3. Short (summarizes the message)
4. Long (expands on the initial text)

(For most writing, I don’t recommend these kinds of stylistic shortcuts; I recommend communicating in your own style.) 

After you dictate something, you can press a stop button or a pause button. This is a great pair of choices because if you’re working on a longer piece, the pause button lets you gather your thoughts, do a bit of research, then resume, ending up with the whole screed in the clipboard. 

The most surprising feature is that it can learn custom words. For example, it learns from your edits, from the manual addition of words or — wait for it — from your Gmail conversation history (a button asks your permission, and you need to choose to explicitly log in to Gmail). The Gmail option brings in not only jargon, but also names, brand names you’ve talked about, abbreviations, foreign words, place names, and others. 

And, finally, the app prominently displays “usage stats,” including how many words, how many words per minute, average dictation speed, total number of words dictated, and the total number of “polishing edits” made by the app. 

AI Edge Eloquent sherlocks Wispr Flow and Willow, which each cost $15 per month. It also sherlocks SuperWhisper, priced at $85 per year. (In Silicon Valley parlance, “sherlocking” is when a major company copies a major feature of a competitor’s product, thereby rendering the competitor’s product obsolete.)

In short, AI Edge Eloquent is kind of perfect and extremely useful for anyone who wants to dictate anything. 

The slow rise of offline AI

I’m seeing a few other tools emerge that are based on the idea that AI should be on the edge and offline. 

One interesting new tool released this week is called WarClaw from a Bellevue, WA-based startup called Edgerunner AI. The company calls the tool a “digital adjutant” (an adjutant is a military officer who serves as an assistant to a military commander). 

The company claims WarClaw was built by former soldiers for use by active-duty military personnel. It’s a secure operating layer built on top of OpenClaw, according to the company. (I talked about OpenClaw earlier this year, as did my colleague Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who explained about how incredibly insecure OpenClaw is. 

The software is designed to work during combat in what they call DDIL settings (Denied, Disconnected, Intermittent, and Low bandwidth).

WarClaw runs on a disconnected mobile device and was trained on specific military data. It automates mission planning, scheduling, and the analyzing of information. Surprisingly, it can directly control office tools like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Slack, web browsers, and email. 

The company has already won contracts to supply WarClaw to three US military branches. 

While WarClaw is for soldiers, I think business people could benefit from such a tool. For example, it would be great to have an offline assistant while traveling on business to data-insecure places (like China) and environments (like airports). 

I’d love to see nearly all the AI jobs currently requiring a connection to be turned into an app that runs locally, disconnected on the phone. Beyond the obvious convenience, that also represents a big opportunity for Google and Apple: they can match their AI tools to increasingly powerful smartphones, which gives phone buyers a powerful reason to upgrade their hardware more frequently. 

AI disclosure: I don’t use AI for writing. The words you see here are mine. I do use a variety of AI tools via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) — backed up by both Kagi Search, Google Search, as well as phone calls to research and fact-check. I use a word processing application called Lex, which has AI tools, and after writing use Lex’s grammar checking tools to find typos and errors and suggest word changes. Here’s why I disclose my AI use and encourage you to do the same.