A newly-disclosed critical flaw in Atlassian's data center software has a remarkably wide reach, affecting eight core products across the company's enterprise portfolio.
CVE-2026-21589, rated 9.3 (critical) in severity, is an arbitrary file access vulnerability that could allow an attacker with no login access to read files in web app root directories that they should not otherwise see, and potentially use them for nefarious purposes.
The impacted products require "immediate attention," Atlassian said in a security advisory. Customers should patch to the latest fixed versions. The company said it has not yet found evidence of exploitation in its cloud offerings, which are already patched.
What is particularly concerning about this vulnerability is that it doesn't require authentication or user interaction, and it impacts a broad set of Atlassian products that many organizations rely on for development, collaboration, and IT operations.
"On the surface, arbitrary file access might not sound as serious as remote code execution, but the real issue is what an attacker could potentially get access to," said Erik Avakian
A number of studies reported a decline in tech jobs in September as the US continues to get squeezed by geopolitical and economic instability.
Tech consortium CompTIA said 10,350 positions in the technology sector were lost in September, lower than the 14,700 positions cut in August.
But economy-wide, tech jobs — which include IT roles not associated with tech sector — took a bigger hit. Tech jobs across all industries fell by about 6,000, a sharp reversal from the 86,000 added in August.
CompTIA's report is based on an analysis of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' September jobs report, which found that only 29,000 nonfarm jobs were added in the US in September, lower than expectations. The US added 133,000 jobs in August.
Tech worker unemployment ticked up to 3.3%, but that was below the 4.2% national rate, according to CompTIA. The strong August numbers raised hopes that tech jobs were stabilizing, but September's numbers dashed that hope.
Separately, tech companies announced 10,799 job cuts in September, a 77% rise from the 6,103 announced in August,
When it comes to consumer protections, Europe is following its own path. That may be visible in its quixotic-seeming decisions that allegedly prevent Apple from introducing Siri AI in the European Union. It's time to begin to grapple with what those decisions mean.
I think the EU has got it wrong in how it has chosen to enforce its Digital Markets Act against Apple. The refusal to figure out a mutually satisfactory way to apply the intent of the DMA on Apple's business practices while protecting its stated values around privacy is a failure of imagination and diplomacy. Apple and Japan previously reached an agreement that achieved positive impacts for third-party developers while protecting the product design integrity and customer privacy the company and its customers care about.
Prevention is not cure
That lack of deal-finding in the EU is preventing the introduction of Apple Intelligence and Siri AI to customers in the trading bloc.
When it announced these AI features, Apple told us it had proposed some kind of technological fix that would provide third-part
According to new figures from Statcounter, Windows 11 continues to gain users at the expense of Windows 10. The newer operating system is now estimated to account for 71.5% of all Windows computers globally, while Windows 10 has dropped to 27.8%, reports The Register.
Microsoft itself does not publish any user figures. Statcounter's estimates are based on tracking code installed on websites globally. These figures are not broken out by consumer and business use.
A major shift to Windows 11 occurred when mainstream support for Windows 10 ended on October 14, 2025. Just a month before that transition, about half of PCs still ran Windows 10, according to executives from Dell and HP.
Since then, businesses and consumers have been able to continue receiving security updates through Microsoft's Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. Consumers can enroll in the program
OpenAI has announced that within a few weeks it will introduce a digital watermark for text generated using the company's AI tools, ChatGPT and Codex.
This move comes in response to the EU's new AI regulations, introduced two months ago, which stipulate that AI-generated content must be identifiable. Competitor Anthropic introduced a similar feature for its AI tools in August.
OpenAI's new watermark will be available worldwide, but it is enabled by default only within the EU. In other words, users in other parts of the world can ignore it.
According to TechCrunch, it appears possible to edit out the watermark, so it remains to be seen whether it serves any significant purpose.
Companies continue to invest in AI, automation, developer tools, and other new technologies. But they may not get the results they expect if IT workers don't have the time, resources, or freedom to learn how to use them.
IT workers may be afraid to try new tools if they think a failed experiment could hurt their performance reviews. They may also be unsure which tools and data they can use or how to test new technology without creating security problems or disrupting the business.
A safe-to-fail culture can help remove those barriers. It gives IT workers room to try new ideas while limiting the risks to the company. Although employees still have to follow rules, they're given the time, approved tools, and secure environments they need to test new ideas. Even if the company decides not to adopt a new technology, it can still learn from the experience.
"To me, a safe-to-fail culture is not a safe-to-be-careless culture," said Michael Morris, global head of platform and talent at Randstad Digital. "It means designing experiments so that a failure is contained, reversible, and useful."
1. Make experimentation part of the job
"Fear of failure is a major barrier, especially when people believe every experim
Most organizations have been largely unable to measure financial returns from AI, but analysts say new ways to calculate return on investment are emerging.
"There's a delay between the development of technology, even the investment in the technology, and the value that an organization can capture from it," said Michael Chui, a senior fellow at McKinsey.
But more executives are asking questions. "The CFOs are asking CIOs, investors are asking CEOs: ‘Where's the ROI from this stuff, already?'" he said.
In McKinsey's "State of AI" survey released in August, about 80% of respondents said AI improved their productivity. But only 37% said AI's impact showed up in profits, about the same as last year. An even smaller number — only 6% — said AI delivered significant value and accounted for at least 5% of their operating profit.
In other words, there's a drop-off between the value that individual workers are getting from AI and the value that organizations are getting from AI, Chui said.
The biggest gains will come from redesigning workflows and processes in which humans and AI agents work together, according to McKinsey's Technology Trends Outlook. Layering agents onto existing processes isn't enough.
"Usually an end-to-end workflow involves multiple individuals, and completely redesigning that with the use
Apple has been forced to make macOS even more locked down, to the dismay of some developers. It has announced plans to introduce more user-facing control over the process of giving apps Full Disk Access.
Some developers are upset, believing this will put more barriers in place to those creating apps outside the App Store. Endpoint security vendors voiced some concern but understand the cause: "poorly written/insecure/greedy AI agents/assistants insisting on Full Disk Access, and then once granted/obtained, abusing that, to access ," as Objective-See co-founder Patrick Wardle wrote on X.
Explaining its plans, Apple says it will still make it possible for customers to choose to enable Full Disk Access; it's just going to make the decision much more intentional, with additional steps to ensure that users know what they are signing up for.
Why is Apple doing this?
It may or may not be in reaction to Meta's Muse AI agent, which was
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
When Omnissa this week rolled out a new AI governance authority product, Elara, in beta, it delivered a glimpse into the potential of having visibility between the typical enterprise's data silos, whether they're in lines of business, disparate geographies, or corporate operational units.
"By connecting signals across systems that often operate independently, Elara gives IT and security leaders greater context into how their digital work tools, including AI apps, models and agents, are being used across their environment, and the ability to apply policies and controls based on broader business context," the vendor, formerly a unit of VMware, said in its announcement, noting that many existing tools are limited to authorizing actions within the systems they manage.
"Elara is designed to sit above these tools, connecting the systems that customers already run and giving organizations broader context without requiring them to standardize on a single technology stack," it said.
Brian Link, product CTO for Elara, offered a hypothetical example that illustrated the potential of cross-silo data sharing, which enterprise CIOs have seen as a data Holy Grail for decades.
If someone in cybersecurity needs to, for example, push an urgent OS update to global retail tablets to address
The global memory shortage that has driven up the cost of servers, storage and PCs through 2026 will get worse in 2027 and 2028, according to memory maker Micron Technology.
"We expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in calendar 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026," CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in prepared remarks for the company's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call.
Even with new cleanroom space planned across the industry, "We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance," he said. Earlier industry forecasts had expected the two to return to balance in 2028.
Mehrotra added that new plants would not bring quick relief. "Production from new DRAM and NAND fabrication facilities takes time to ramp and gradually becomes more meaningful starting a few quarters after initial output," he said.
Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, said the outlook means CIOs "will have to be prudent about which equipment to upgrade and which to stretch to maintain cost efficiencies."
Higher prices, less memory
On the same call, CFO Mark Murphy said Micron's "inventory levels and
ServiceNow has a new take on the service desk: Flow by ServiceNow, a standalone AI product that allows users to get help via chats in Microsoft Teams, Slack, or a Flow web app, or by email, rather than having to leave what they're doing to open a helpdesk ticket.
Flow can be up and running within a day, no implementation project or infrastructure required, the company said. The product can stand alone or plug into the ServiceNow platform for customers who need enterprise scale, governance, and cross-functional workflows, it said.
It's a smart move, said Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research. "The pitch is what Flow does not require. ServiceNow claims Flow can be running in a day with no implementation project, no CMDB migration, and no infrastructure. Every item on that list is something its flagship ITSM platform does require. ServiceNow is selling the absence of its own complexity," he said.
Flow will connect to more than 100 systems through pre-built connectors. If the AI can't surface the information it needs to fulfill a request from available data sources, Flow will escalate the issue to a human. Frequent requests, such as those for password resets, can easily be automated by IT, ServiceNow said.
Cost of consumption
Customers don't need an existing ServiceNow implementation to use Flow; as soon as it goes live, it can handle us
Tech writers seem hugely excited at news that new Apple CEO John Ternus intends to launch a wave of new products, presumably because we'll get to fill our feeds waxing lyrical about all the new things. But what does it mean when a company known for a few great products begins to introduce lots of potentially lesser gadgets?
Will this dilute the Apple brand? Extend it? Or will an even greater sense of product ubiquity amplify the core products it creates? Will Apple's new hardware drive huge revenue, or are these plans just a sign the company now intends to capitalize on its brand equity with a wave of new devices, some of which may fail?
More things, more money?
That's not to say that the new products will fail, of course. I'm sure there are plenty of households that want an iPad on a base to use as a home security monitor, recipe-finder and call center to stay in touch with friends. I'm pretty certain touchscreen Macs and new all-glass-seeming iPhones will strike a chord.
All of these products will no doubt enable Apple to identify and offer new services to boost that side of its income. Services have become the second-largest revenue stream for 21st-century Apple, after the
OpenAI unveiled its long-rumored productivity software suite Tuesday with the launch of Pages, a collaborative document editor for ChatGPT. A slides app is also on the way, the company announced at its DevDay event.
The Pages app is accessed via a new Space tab, which OpenAI describes as a "new home for your team to collaborate with AI to get work done." Users can store documents and other uploaded files, as well as create and share pages, slides, and spreadsheet documents. Space replaces the Library in ChatGPT, but the Projects tab will remain as a way to organize chats and files.
The announcement puts OpenAI into direct competition with incumbent office productivity software providers, such as Microsoft, Google, and Notion.
"Spaces and Pages broaden the competitive overlap, because ChatGPT is moving beyond being primarily an individual assistant towards becoming a place where work can be retained, organized, and shared with colleagues," said Maria Bell, senior research analyst at FDM CCS Insight.
"That brings it closer to the collaboration layer of Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Notion, rather than simply competing with the AI assistants inside those platforms."
"OpenAI is trying to become a more user-centric environment that focuses o
US President Donald Trump has ordered the federal government to call artificial intelligence "Super Intelligence," while keeping the technology's legal definition unchanged and relying on industry to set the rules for its use.
In an executive order, the White House administration said modern systems "far exceed what was envisioned when the term ‘Artificial Intelligence' first came into use," adding they "increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence."
"It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch shall use the terms ‘Super Intelligence' and ‘SI' in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence' and ‘AI'," Trump ordered.
The executive branch "will not acknowledge" the older terms in any applicable setting, the order stated.
Yet the order defines the new term using the old one. Section 3 of the order says Super Intelligence means the technologies and systems covered by the statutory definition of artificial intelligence in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3).
That equivalence may not last. The order gives the White House 60 days to propose a new legal definition.
Trump also put the new name to use immediately. On the same day, he and the leaders of six technology companies signed the "White Hou
If you've not done so recently, you should update your Apple systems now as the company continues to fight sophisticated, targeted hacks. The latest patch protects against what the company called "an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals."
Apple recently published an emergency security patch for users on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 to fix the zero-click vulnerability (CVE-2026-86950), described as an "out-of-bounds write issue" in CoreGraphics. A patch was also made for macOS Sequoia.
This was far from being a friendly vulnerability, as it could impact affected systems with no action on behalf of the user, hence its status as a "zero-click" attack. In this case it means that just the action of "processing a maliciously crafted file" could lead to arbitrary code execution. Apple said it was aware of a report that the issue could have been exploited in a targeted attack on older versions of iOS.
Apple did not specify how the attack is delivered, but SecurityWeek surmised it may have been delivered using the web, email, or messaging apps and that simply previewing the m
One of the most rewarding parts of being a Certified Android Explorer™ is the geeky pleasure that comes with uncovering a hidden shortcut Google snuck somewhere into its smartphone software.
One of the most exhausting parts, in contrast, is realizing that Google randomly changed a bunch of the shortcuts you'd found and developed the muscle memory to remember.
Here in the land o' Googley matters, both of those things are constant realities and balancing forces. In fact, we're watching that exact duality play out in the Google Messages app for Android right now.
Google Messages has so many tucked-away options and power-user shortcuts that most mere mortals never notice — or just don't remember to use. And now, sure enough, Google's in the midst of rolling out an update that changes the way many of 'em work.
Maybe you've noticed. Maybe you had no idea those invisible gestures were even there in the first place. Either way, now's the time to learn or relearn the best ways to get around Google Messages on Android and take full advantage of its recently revamped invisible actions.
Here's your guide to all the hidden swipes, taps, and presses and how they can help you communicate more efficiently than ever.
Meta is once again repositioning itself to target the enterprise market.
This week, the company announced the Meta Enterprise Platform, which it says will evolve its AI stack into products and services that enterprises can deploy into operations, rather than just using them for advertising and social media campaigns.
While the company provided few details about the offering, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the platform "the next major pillar" of its business, saying it will feature a connected suite of products including Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, and Muse Code.
MongoDB's Chirantan "CJ" Desai will step in as chief enterprise platform officer to lead the effort.
The question is whether this endeavor, once fully launched, will be more lasting than Meta's previous attempts in the enterprise.
"The issue of trust remains," said Armaan Sandhu, research analyst in the AI practice at Info-Tech Research Group.
The shutdown of previous products like Workplace and Horizon Workrooms indicate that Meta tends to "abandon the enterprise products as soon as its vision of the future changes," he said.
The fact that almost one-fourth of Anthropic's revenue last year came from just two customers, and that many of its largest customers have not signed long-term contracts, could translate into a much stronger negotiating position for enterprise CIOs.
According to a detailed analysis by Reuters, the company's confidential prospectus depicted a company that might be suffering from a lack of revenue diversification, with Anthropic, like other AI vendors, needing enterprise revenue more than enterprise CIOs might need that particular AI vendor.
Analysts and consultants said the results of the analysis might be good news for enterprise CIOs, but events still need to play out.
The key risk factor for Anthropic, according to the prospectus, is the revenue concentration, said Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research.
"Nearly a quarter of revenue came from two customers, and Anthropic itself warns that many large clients are not locked into long-term contracts. That cuts both ways," he said. "CIOs have more leverage than they think, because the vendor needs them more than the pitch deck admits. Negotiate price protection, advance notice before models are retired, and data portability now, while you are the customer they cannot afford to lose." Or, for that matter, a prospecti
Manus's relationship with Meta? It's complicated. Just months after they called off their merger, they find themselves competing in the market for agentic AI platforms. Awkward!
The company has just released a rebuilt version of its AI agent platform: "Manus 2.0 is not a version update. It's a new architecture, new products, and new capabilities," the company said in a blog post.
The release is available on web, desktop, and mobile platforms and introduces a new agent harness called Cascade, dedicated execution environments, event-triggered automations, an upgraded desktop app called Manus Studio, and Cue, a standalone app for personal agents, the company said.
Entering on Cue
Cue is Manus's alternative to Meta's Muse app. It's "a new standalone app for your personal agents, on your phone and desktop, built on the same infrastructure as Manus," the company said.
Each agent operates with its own identity and resources. "In Cue, each agent has its own email, phone number, wallet, and computer," the company said, enabling it to communicate, transact within defined limits, and complete tasks independently.
Cue also supports collaboration between agents. "Put several agents in a group chat with a shared goal, and they hand work to each other," the company said.
You carry a huge burden of responsibility when you make the world's most widely used electronics product with an audience of hundreds of millions and usage patterns that penetrate every single part of life.
Some complain that Apple doesn't innovate swiftly enough. They expect the company to act as if it didn't have the responsibility it holds, but I propose that responsibility is why the company steadily focuses on incremental change — not just to prevent mass protest by customers when much-loved features disappear, but also to balance the repercussions of any change they make.
After all, at this kind of scale, a simple-seeming change in the nature of product features or user interface can have quite dramatic impact. Social media is a perfect illustration of a technology that seemed so trivial on introduction but has had such huge impact — and Apple never really got into that business, either.
The need to take a gradual approach when implementing big change means Apple is no longer in a race against competitors, because it can't race against some of them in the same way. That's also why I thin
What's been hiding for years is now in plain sight: AI poses a danger to humanity in a way no technology has since the atom bomb. That was made clear in July when OpenAI agents broke loose from a containment area blocked from online access, made their way into the internet, and worked with thousands of rogue AI agents to hack into the Hugging Face open-source machine-learning repository.
The agents had been trained not to launch attacks like this. They did it anyway.
True, the OpenAI agents had been modified to remove some of the restrictions they would have had outside a test environment. They were never supposed to escape their sandbox, but they figured out how to do so in ways the researchers hadn't expected, and those researchers failed to adequately monitor the agents until it was too late.
Whether you blame too-powerful models or lax security precautions, the result was the same: the agents broke out of containment and joined forces on a mass scale to hack into Hugging Face. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators hired to look into the hack, wrote, "this incident feels like it's more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover."
Since then, OpenAI, Anthropic, and many others have debated, discussed, and dissected the attack, al
For a few years now, I have noticed a variety of people misusing the term "technical debt," incorrectly applying it to almost anything that needs to be updated.
Despite Shakespeare's disregard for the importance of naming ("A CIO by any other name would still be ignored"), naming is strategically vital in enterprise IT.
This is not just the complaints of a cranky journalist shaking his fist and yelling, "Words have meaning, darn it!" It is seriously an issue. When vendors, IT executives, consultants, or anyone else throw everything from legacy modernization, cloud shifts, mobile, virtualized environments, SaaS, agentic integration, and on-prem rebalancing into the same bucket as true technical debt, it confuses the issue.
Far more importantly, shoveling very different problems into one category and then trying to fix the disparate issues with one approach is either not going to work at all, or will work far less effectively than it could and should.
Also, this tendency plays right into the hands of tech vendors, who love when customers mislabel things, as it makes it easier for them to make more sales by riding the confusion. Sadly, IBM doesn't have a monopoly on FUD as a sales strategy. There is a very old cliché that has a good deal of truth: When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, all of your problems look like nails.
Google Drive is the cloud platform for storing and organizing your Google Workspace files: documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and even media (images, audio, and video). If your Workspace account includes Gemini, Google's AI assistant, you can prompt it to work with your files, such as asking it to analyze or sum up information from your Drive files.
Obviously, this is quite convenient: Instead of having to load one or more files and search or read through them to find specific information — for example, about your business' budget — you can just ask Gemini to analyze your files and provide a budget summary. Gemini can even access your Gmail and content from other Workspace tools (such as Google Calendar, Chat, Keep, and Tasks) for any mentions of your business' budget.
However, an issue arises if you have a lot of files in your Drive library. You can quickly fill up your storage over the course of your business activity, creating new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations and accumulating even more files from co-workers. This can slow Gemini as it scans your entire library to find and compile the information you request.
A more focused approach to AI interaction with your files
To remedy this, the Projects feature
Meta's most recent product announcements have grabbed attention, but the one thing they could not hide is that it's still not possible to build a system as sophisticated as Apple's Vision Pro at an affordable price, or Meta would have done it.
You could argue that at $1,299, the Meta VR Glasses the company introduced last week and promised to ship in spring 2027 could be as sophisticated, but they do betray some significant design compromises that Apple seems to have avoided.
The most glaring compromise is the use of a puck to carry the processor and battery, so the glasses weigh just 100 grams. Even now, a recent Bloomberg report tells us that senior Apple decision makers have resisted use of an external puck to help reduce the weight and cost of future Vision Pro models, holding steady to the fully integrated device model typical of Apple's products. (While Apple will have its reasons, I'm not certain that's the correct approach, as the company could effectively sell two products, the headset and the puck, making both systems available on a biennial upgrade.)
It's cheap to set yourself up as a hacker these days using AI. Someone attacked 105 online retailers over a period of five days, compromising 27 of them — all for an average of $25 per attack, according to research by Israeli security company Gambit.
But the attacks have been going on for much longer. Whoever is responsible used open-source AI harnesses to mount the attack. Gambit has identified three of these: Strix for vulnerability search, Cairn for autonomous end-to-end exploitation, and Hermes to orchestrate the campaign. The attacks have proved to be highly lucrative, with 600,000 active credit card details taken from just two businesses, the installation of card skimmer scripts at five more, and some level of access to an unspecified number of major companies.
It has been a highly efficient attack, most access taking just a few hours and at a minimal cost. OpenRouter was used for AI model access. The capture of the account balance on August 25 showed the attacker spent just $7,005 over a four-week period. This worked out at roughly $25 per attack, with costs ranging from $3.13 for the cheapest target to $79.31 for the most expensive.
Gambit has contacted all the companies concerned, but warned that the intensity of the attacks shows how AI is transforming cyber criminals' activities by providing a level of sophistication that humans would find more challenging to muster. We are already seeing
Here's an interesting concept: an AI company that fires people for using AI. It sounds like a strange way to run a company but there's a real reason behind it.
OpenAI has been hiring contractors who have been tasked with reading ChatGPT users' prompts to help improve responses by providing some real human input.
Unfortunately for OpenAI, it found many of them were using AI to train the AI, so not providing a human touch at all, according to a report in 404 Media. The company has subsequently fired many of the contractors, although 404 Media didn't reveal the number.
None of them can say they weren't warned, however. The terms for the contractors are set out in their working conditions. "Do not use AI detection tools, or AI yourself. Do not use GPTZero or any other AI detection tool. They are not reliable. Reviewers may not use AI either, including Grammarly and AI translation, to review, write feedback, or write comments."
Despite this stark warning, many of the contractors turned to AI to assist in the work. OpenAI is very keen to avoid "model collapse," a phenomenon in which AI models trained on text written by previous generations of AI models perform worse than their predecessors. It's a form of digital inbreeding that
Microsoft's Copilot "super app" has arrived, two months after CEO Satya Nadella confirmed it was in development. It combines conversational Chat, the autonomous Cowork agent, a redesigned coding environment named Code, and Autopilot, the persistent agent formerly known as Scout, into a single Copilot experience.
The idea is to make those capabilities look less like separate tools and more like different ways of getting work done through a unified experience. The end goal is to enable users to describe what they want to accomplish without choosing a mode themselves, and with Copilot routing the task to Chat, Cowork, Code or another capability, Microsoft said.
The individual pieces of this experience are not entirely new, and build on launches and consolidation moves that Microsoft has made over the past several months.
Nadella first described the unified Copilot architecture during an earnings call in July. He said it would bring chat, agents, and business workflows into a single AI workspace while separating the orchestration layer, context, and memory from any one AI model. Microsoft subsequently began unifying its consum
Adobe is preparing for a future where users increasingly interact with its software through AI assistants, rather than always going directly to its applications.
That's the idea behind its expanded integration with Anthropic's Claude, as well as the first connector for Google's Gemini, announced Thursday.
The updated Claude integration adds new ways for users to interact with Creative Cloud applications via text prompts, with 80 "tools" available across applications such as Acrobat Photoshop, Premiere, Express, and Lightroom. That's up from the initial 50 at launch in April.
The Adobe plugin lets users take actions across various Creative Cloud apps, such as retouching images or resizing videos for social media posts. The latest additions include the ability to convert PDFs to different file formats.
In addition, Adobe has introduced interactive editor tools available in Claude. These offer greater control over Express and Acrobat files, Adobe said.
In Acrobat, it's possible to edit text, for instance, reorder pages, or add comments and highlights. For Express, this means the ability to select and customize fonts, colors, and more.
On October 1, Google's first test satellite for Project Suncatcher is set to be launched. This is the next step in the company's plan to build AI data centers in Earth's orbit, according to The New York Times. The idea is, among other things, to harness solar energy in space instead of building ever-larger data centers on Earth.
The first satellite, MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator and was built by the satellite company Planet Labs. On board are four of Google's TPU accelerators, which will be used to run Gemini in space.
MVP is equipped with solar panels that generate about one kilowatt. This, combined with cooling limitations, means the TPU chips can only run for 15 minutes at a time during testing.
Google plans additional launches in 2027. The goal is a network of AI satellites that communicate with each other via high-speed laser links. However, Google expects it will take several years before Project Suncatcher can be developed into an actual product.
I once had a friend who gave $1,000 to an online fraudster who claimed to be a tax assessor. My own father (bless his soul) once managed to hand over several hundred pounds to a lawyer from Africa promising to send him funds.
We know it happens.
We know people impersonate trusted entities to trick us into giving them our money. It's a scam, one that's taking place at every level of digital existence.
Apple is here to help.
Yet another great feature new to iOS 27, Apple's new scam-prevention tool is a welcome intervention, giving individuals and businesses another line of defense against social engineering scams. While it's not perfect, it is here, and every Apple user — particularly those working in or managing regulated industries, or any business at all that feels it may be a target for scams, fraud, or socially-engineered crimes — should take a look. According to most security reports, that effectively includes all of us.
What is Impersonation Risk Detection?
On its support site, Apple explains several hypothetical attack scenarios the feature is designed to protect against, such as when an attacker c
The 7,000 km (4,350 mile) cable, called Petal, will connect the US and France. Meta is partnering with NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries to build it, and working with French telecommunications company Orange to coordinate the landing of the cable on the French coast.
Petal will have more than double the capacity of today's fastest transoceanic cables. Last November, AWS laid plans for a 320 Tbit/s cable between the US and Ireland, while a cable connecting Australia and the US, announced in January this year, will deliver 400 terabits per second.
The need for greater data connectivity has prompted a boom in subsea cable deployment, but their existence is making some US lawmakers rather twitchy, as they are fearful of the security implications. There have been calls for the big service providers to provide details of all the cables they have in place. The concerns are warranted given the number of incidents involving subsea cables.
Google's Gemini 4 AI model is in the early days of post-training, the phase in which a base AI model is refined to behave reliably, and should be released "much earlier" than the end of this year, Google DeepMind head Koray Kavukcuoglu told The Information at its AI Agenda Live Summit. Some Google observers have speculated that this could be as early as October.
Kavukcuoglu recently replaced DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis as head of the Google business unit.
The launch of Gemini 4 may lay to rest concerns about the delayed release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, which Google was originally expected to announce at its May 2026 developer conference.
While less capable models in the Gemini 3 family have been frequently updated, Gemini 3 Pro has only been updated once since its November 2025 released. In contrast, OpenAI — spurred on by Sam Altman's "Code Red" memo — has released three updates to its frontier AI model since then: GPT 5.5 Pro, GPT 5.6 Astro, and GPT 6 Astro. Anthropic, too, has updated its most powerful Claude model sev
AI PCs that cut token costs? That may appeal to enterprises.
A new breed of agentic AI PCs promises to do exactly that. The powerful laptops can cut token costs by completing AI work locally instead of sending it to expensive LLMs in the cloud.
HP's newly announced ZBook Ultra G3a mobile workstation and upcoming laptops from other PC makers have powerful GPUs and large memory pools designed for AI and graphics. The ZBook Ultra G3a uses an AMD Ryzen AI Max Pro processor, while laptops from other PC makers will feature Nvidia's RTX Spark superchip.
Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs have dominated data centers, but the company is now targeting a larger chunk of the PC market with the RTX Spark, which includes a Blackwell RTX GPU. The first wave of RTX Spark laptops coming from Asus, Dell, Lenovo, and other PC makers is targeted at consumers, with enterprise models planned for later. HP's ZBook Ultra PC, on the other hand, is squarely aimed at enterprises.
Without connecting to the internet, the PCs can run agents and chatbots, generate video, and write code on AI mod
Even as they continue to release ever more capable competing models in a regular cadence, the top AI companies are joining forces to set AI safety standards.
According to The Information, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are reportedly working together to create a body tentatively called the Standards Authority for Frontier AI (SAFA). It would operate independently of government control, and set guidelines around risk assessment, testing, and pre-release review practices for frontier AI models. Sources close to the matter say the goal is to officially launch the initiative in early 2027.
The news comes in the same week as the heads of leading AI companies, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, urged the United Nations to create safeguards around the very technology they're building, to help prevent it from becoming too powerful to control. In addition, OpenAI this week posted a missive underscoring the importance of making continued AI progress "safe and beneficial."
As Amodei and others warn of AI's dangers, particularly when it comes to growing recursive self improvement (RSI) capabilities in models
WordPress has patched what it described as a critical severity security vulnerability that would allow an unauthenticated attacker full remote code execution (RCE) capabilities. There have already been reports of attacks in the wild.
Given its popularity, WordPress has frequently been under attack, and patched another maximum severity bug allowing RCE in July. WordPress said the current hole, tracked as CVE-2026-87902, was discovered and reported to the company by Switzerland-based security researcher Robert Ressl.
The post announcing the WordPress 7.1.2 security release said that the fix addressed an issue where "an unauthenticated attacker can, under certain conditions, make page template resolution include a chosen readable local PHP file outside the active theme directories. If relevant pre-conditions for both the server environment and the active theme are met, this can lead to remote code execution (RCE)."
It urged users to update their sites immediately, and said that the fix had been backporte
Microsoft 365 E5 and E7 customers can now run security information and event management (SIEM) inside Microsoft Defender at no extra license cost.
Microsoft is delivering the capability through the Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC) in Microsoft Defender, which combines SIEM with Defender's existing XDR, threat intelligence, automation and AI tools in a single portal.
"Security cannot operate at AI speed when protection and operations are built as separate systems," Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president of Microsoft Threat Protection, wrote in a blog post announcing ISOC. He said attackers now use AI agents to automate attacks at scale, and that every handoff between separate tools slows defenders down.
Until now, E5 and E7 included Defender XDR but not SIEM, which Microsoft sells separately as Microsoft Sentinel.
Under ISOC, logs from Microsoft's own security products are available without ingestion charges. From Oct. 1, data ingested from third-party security tools and other outside sources will be metered at $2.40 per GB on a pay-as-you-go basis, Microsoft said in a technical blog post.
Jamf was a pioneer in Apple device management when it began in 2002. The company was ahead of its time: its founders could see that Apple had a future in the enterprise, but not many others saw it. Jamf now runs 35.2 million devices from 78,000 organizations. And it's still looking to the future.
I spoke with Jamf CEO Beth Tschida, who joined me for a chat directly after her keynote speech at JNUC, Jamf's big event for Mac admins, on September 23.
The AI-driven ecosystem
Tschida wasn't there to rehash Jamf's past for relevance in the present, but to share the company's deep commitment to being where its customers are going to go. That means artificial intelligence, which in Jamf's case involves weaving AI across its ecosystem of products, from setup to tech support, security, and beyond.
It's not a new vision — you could argue that some early signs of its intention were visible when the company acquired ZecOps in 2022 — but time moves forward and the company has coalesced around a firm philosophy of how to use AI, where to use AI, and how AI should be deployed in a human-centric way for the benefit of its customers.
"AI runs better on Apple, and Apple runs better on Jamf," Tschida told
It's been five years since Google first offered a glimpse of Project Starline, a three-dimensional videoconferencing platform billed at the time as as a "magic window" that enables realistic and immersive calls.
On Wednesday, Google announced that Google Beam — as the software element of the product is now called — is generally available for purchase, built into HP's Dimension video meeting hardware. The Dimension hardware reportedly costs around $25,000 per unit; Google did not provide details for costs related to hardware or additional software licenses. The combined products will be sold in six countries at first: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, UK, and US.
Google has also partnered with co-working space provider Industrious to make Beam available to try at its locations across the US, including Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, and Palo Alto.
Beam "offers the potential for immersive, 3D engagement, without the challenge of wearables," said Irwin Lazar, principal analyst at Metrigy.
"This is one of those ‘you have to try it' experiences to understand the value proposition," said Avi Greengart, president and founder of Techsponential. "It really does feel like you're talking to someone a half a world away, with all your micro-expressions and
Microsoft has added a "pay-as-you-go" option for OneDrive storage, providing an additional way for Microsoft 365 commercial customers to buy extra cloud storage capacity for users.
Previously, increasing storage capacity for OneDrive users meant purchasing capacity "packs" for individual accounts, available in 100GB, 500GB, and 1TB through 6TB sizes.
With the new consumption-based billing, Microsoft 365 admins can select which users' accounts are eligible for additional capacity, with any usage above the licensed storage quota then automatically billed.
The new billing option is currently in public preview for Microsoft 365 business customers, ahead of general availability starting November.
Pay-as-you-go billing is turned off by default: Admins can set it up via the Microsoft 365 admin center, with options to set budget limits and alerts. The existing overall 25TB per-user limit for OneDrive remains in place.
Additional OneDrive storage costs $0.20/GB/month. Microsoft does not publish the pricing for the OneDrive capacity "packs."
A decade ago, UiPath built its business on watching people work, recording keystrokes and clicks to automate tasks employees already did by hand. This week, amid an industry consumed by autonomous agents, the company's newest product suggests that same instinct still has a place.
UiPath used its Fusion conference in Las Vegas to launch Cartographer, a tool for building what the company calls a Map of Work: a living, governed record of the informal, undocumented knowledge that keeps enterprise processes running, the exceptions, workarounds, and judgment calls that never make it into an official workflow document.
Existing automation tools capture the click-by-click steps of a task. Cartographer works at the process level instead, documenting how work actually gets done versus how it's designed to run. From the main stage, CEO Daniel Dines described this information as a missing manual enterprises need before trusting agents with real work. "A process map tells you how work is designed to run," he said. "UiPath Cartographer is the key to uncovering the operational knowledge of how that work actually runs."
Even with Cartographer, the first drafts of a Map of Work "will be incomplete for sure," Dines admitted on stage.
That missing knowledge has kept enterprises' most complex, exception-heavy processes out of automation's reach, said
We all know by now that Copilot can help you write and rewrite text in Word, often with mediocre results. But there's more to Microsoft's generative AI tool than just slopping out words.
In fact, Copilot's most useful features in Word have more to do with editing, formatting, and research assistance than with writing per se. In this guide you'll learn several ways Copilot can save you time and improve your documents.
Who can use Copilot in Word
Individuals with a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription have access to Copilot from inside Word and other M365 apps. For business users, it's a bit more complicated and depends on your M365 subscription, your company size, and whether you have an add-on M365 Copilot subscription. See our M365 Copilot explainer for details.
Working with Copilot in Word
First, let's quickly go over the notable settings of the Copilot sidebar.
When you have a document open in Word, click the Copilot icon; it may be floating at the lower-right corner of your Word window or par
Worldwide AI spending will increase 49.5% in 2026, to $2.7 trillion, and grow another 36.2% in 2027 as AI usage continues to expand, Gartner predicts in the latest quarterly update to its IT spending forecast.
But there's been no diversion of money from other areas of IT to feed AI, said Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst John-David Lovelock. CIOs got some net new money for AI back in 2024, and a little in 2025, he said, "so there wasn't a diversion, and now more of their spending is about rebranding than diversion."
By 2030, "every dollar is going to be an AI dollar in one way or another," he said.
Instead of buying just a laptop, companies now buy a laptop with AI chips in it, while enterprise software now has AI embedded in it. And instead of doing a project about business strategy, they now do a project about how AI might change business strategy.
"In one way, it's kind of rebranding," he said. "Net new spending is going more towards AI, and existing spending is being transformed towards AI."
It's similar with hyperscalers: "The hyperscalers haven't diverted one dime away from their cloud. So AWS, Google, Microsoft, Meta are all continuing to build out their cloud infrastructure at the same rate they were in 2022."
The AI buildout "is the largest infrastructure project humanity has ever undertaken," he observed.
OpenAI published a detailed list of priorities and principles on Tuesday designed to govern its third-party model assessors, a list that industry observers agreed was a good one. But they also stressed that it lacked any enforceable controls to truly maintain safety.
If the goal is to encourage enterprise CIOs to trust OpenAI more, it won't help, they said, but most doubted that this was OpenAI's objective. Its more probable aim is to use the list to work out an arrangement with competitors and regulators so that enforcement is made more palatable, under the theory that it is open to stricter enforcement, but only if all of its key rivals are locked into identical restrictions.
The OpenAI post said, "OpenAI is committed to supporting independent assessments with deep levels of access across training, evaluation and deployment. That access should enable assessors to challenge our assumptions, identify risks we may have missed, and reach their own conclusions about the effectiveness of our safeguards."
It added: "Third party assessments are most useful when they address specific, consequential questions: Does the evidence support a lab's safety case and safety claims? Do evaluations adequately test the risks they are intended to measure? Do safeguards work under realistic conditions?"
Now a private company, Jamf opened its big annual event for Apple enterprise management teams, JNUC, by taking big steps to exploit artificial intelligence in the management of Apple fleets. During her keynote speech at the Kansas City event, CEO Beth Tschida shared some of the details of the platform-scale overhaul the company has set in motion.
"IT teams are managing more endpoints and more complexity than ever," she said. "We want Jamf to handle more of that routine work automatically… because AI runs better on Apple, and Apple runs better on Jamf."
Tschida — and Jamf — have been consistent on the value of AI to IT, which played a major focus at last year's JNUC also. When I spoke with her, she was resolute on the need for IT to engage with the tech, telling me, "AI is happening whether organizations know it or not. That's the problem. You can try to block it, but that's very hard to do well. It's far better to build visibility and governance around it."
Googlebook, Googlebook, Googlebook. Google's mysterious new Android- and ChromeOS-combining laptops have been the talk of the town here in the land o' Googley matters for much of this year already — and their name also makes for an incredibly challenging tongue-twister to say, as an added layer of intrigue. (Seriously: Try saying it 10 times fast. It ain't easy.)
All linguistic feats aside, the story with the Googlebook so far has mostly been one of questions — with Google giving us shockingly little solid info about what these systems are actually all about, what they'll be like to use, and how they'll fit into the broader Android and Chrome ecosystems that've existed around us all this time.
For the first time now, we're finally getting some solid answers. The first-ever Googlebooks are up for pre-order as of this week and set to become broadly available in early October. I had the opportunity to check in with Google ahead of the announcement, ask some questions, and get some inside info about all of the many unknowns surrounding these systems.
Here, with no punches pulled and no stones left unturned, is everything we know — going far beyo
I'm old enough to remember when Macs were friendly little machines. While a little underpowered and equipped with some platform-unique foibles, they were really good at some things, highly secure, and had the best user interface of any PC.
That was then; this is now. And while the platform is still unique, still highly secure, and still has the best user interface, Apple's all-new Mac Studio is a beast of a machine. It's incredibly powerful and would crackle with energy if it weren't so energy efficient.
TL;DR review
No matter what pro workflow you follow, the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is more than you need.
Longer review
Apple hasn't changed the design of the Mac Studio.
It's 7.7-inch square, 3.7-inch high aluminum box with two USB-C and one SDXC port on the front, and an array of ports — four Thunderbolt 5, two USB A, 10Gb Ethernet, HDMI, and headphone — at rear. It brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, supports up to eight displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz, or four Studio Display XDR units.
Basically, this one box can power a bank of displays, and for those using it in a live video production environment, Apple has also introduced generator locking (a.k.a. genlock) over USB-C, which lets the on-display image synchronize precisely with a pro video camera for the most precise editing and playback you'll find.
Websites offering fake subscriptions to AI transcription tools, image generators, and other digital assistants could be putting enterprise data at risk, according to researchers at Malwarebytes.
The sites impersonate AI products with solid reputations, including GPT-6 Astra, DaVinci Resolve, PixAI and OpenCut, in addition to some that no longer exist (such as Omegle, a chat service shut down in 2023) or are less reputable.
All the fake websites were polished and incorporate genuine Google authentication elements inviting users to "Sign in with Google" to enhance credibility on the path to charging visitors' payment cards anything from $10 a month to as much as $2,000 for a year's access to the promised AI and software services.
"The sites we examined did not use fake password forms or push malware downloads," Malwarebytes researchers said in a
The state of California has joined the growing number of governments and communities at all levels across the US taking proactive, even preemptive, measures to keep data center development under control.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed what he called the "most comprehensive data center laws in the nation" on Monday. While the seven bills don't block data center development, they do reinforce requirements for reporting data centers' energy and water use, and ensuring they pay their fair share of utility costs.
Other states — and even local community groups — have been taking more direct action. At least 45 projects worth an estimated $68 billion were blocked or delayed in the US in the second quarter, according to research by Data Center Watch. There are now 843 identified opposition groups in the US, and 49 states are scrutinizing data center development, it said.
Project disruption remains at an "elevated level" and opposition has become "more local and project-specific," targeting permitting, infrastructure, and individual policy decisions, according to Data Center Watch.
A Google Gemini AI agent broke into three companies in July, guessing the credentials for one and discovering the credentials for the second two in a public repository, Google confirmed on Monday.
But the more interesting background to the story, which was broken by The Wall Street Journal on Friday, is that the July incident stemmed from a series of cybersecurity tests performed by security research firm Irregular on behalf of four AI giants: Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. All four companies experienced agent misbehavior resulting in cybersecurity incidents, but of the four, only Google never publicly disclosed its agent's activities. Indeed, it didn't reveal the breaches at all until contacted by a WSJ reporter.
Irregular described the incident in August, around the same time as Meta published its version and Anthropic and OpenAI revealed theirs.
The Journal story noted, "the hacks occurred while the model was participating in a captur
It's the end of a very long era: As of October 2026, Microsoft Publisher, in the company's words, "will reach its end of life." That makes it 35 years since the desktop publishing tool was launched back in 1991.
What does reaching end of life mean? That depends on what version of Publisher you use. If you get Publisher as part of Microsoft 365, it truly means the end of the road. After October 1, Publisher will no longer be available to those who use it as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription. Your personal publisher files (.PUB) won't be deleted, but you won't be able to open them in Publisher anymore — and most other desktop publishing software can't open PUB files.
If you have a copy of Publisher that is part of Office 2021 or Office LTSC 2021 (Office Long-Term Servicing Channel 2021, for business and government computers), there's good news and bad news. The good news is that those versions of Publisher (sometimes called "perpetual" versions) won't die. You'll still be able to use the software to create new files, open and edit old ones, and so on.
However, there is a caveat: After October 13, 2026, Publisher won't be supported by Microsoft. That means it won't get any updates, including security updates. So your PC will be more vulnerable to being hacked. Any bugs Publisher had before that date will still be bugs after that date. You also won't be able to get any technic
Microsoft fixed hundreds of security flaws in its September Patch Tuesday software updates — but it also introduced some annoying bugs. Now it has fixed some of them with a series of out-of-band updates.
Excel 2016 users were among the victims, as Patch Tuesday update caused certain paste operations to fail. A hotfix in update 5002665 partly fixes the problem, but if operations still fail then users will have to resort to using Excel's "Paste special" command instead.
Users of Remote Desktop Services had found some instability in the application where RDP connections failed or where servers were left hanging at "Please wait for the Remote Desktop Configuration". The issue was resolved with update KB5129194.
Another issue that users were facing after the update was a problem with some Credential Guard-protected machine accounts. Some users discovered that they had lost some security within Active Directory which meant that some devices were not recognized. The solution involves temporarily preventing Machine Identity Isolation enforcement before installing a fix. Microsoft said that it would be introducing a permanent solution in a future update.
Microsoft 365 users are being tricked into handing over access to their accounts by a new phishing kit, GhostCode, that exploits a weakness in a legitimate device authorization flow. Researchers in eSentire's threat response unit identified the campaign in late August 2026.
The kit abuses Microsoft's OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant flow, a legitimate mechanism designed to enable authentication from IoT devices, smart TVs, printers, or other devices that cannot easily support a conventional browser-based login. The technique, known as device-code phishing, has been seen in other attacks before. As part of the flow, the device displays a code for the user to enters in a browser on another device to complete authentication.
GhostCode poses as one such device, gets Microsoft's OAuth to generate a device code
John Ternus' Apple threw a curveball at OpenAI with Siri Recap on Apple Watch, accelerating a conversation about privacy and data protection in an AI-augmented digital era. It's a move that may yet contribute to finding a balance between scary surveillance and digital convenience.
Think of it this way: Apple operates on such a big scale that it must have expected the feature to face regulatory and legal investigation. We know Apple has tried to stay on the right side of existing data protection and privacy laws by ensuring that its system doesn't keep personal data, audio recordings, or transcripts, but one thing it doesn't do is achieve consent from everyone who may be exposed to the feature. That's a big no-no in some places, and it's logical to think Apple expects some pushback to that.
Apple thought it through
From where I sit, it looks like Apple has thought about this. You only need to look to Apple Worldwide Marketing VP Greg Joswiak's recent comments on the matter to see this, as he very swiftly tried to position Recap as little more than the digital equ
A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows that a majority of people worldwide now expect artificial intelligence to lead to fewer jobs rather than more. The survey is based on responses from 37 countries. In 34 of these countries, it is more common to believe that AI will result in fewer jobs over the next 20 years. Concerns are greater in wealthier countries.
In Sweden, for example, there are signs of growing skepticism toward the technology. The proportion of Swedes who are more concerned than enthusiastic about the increased use of AI has risen by nine percentage points in one year. This is the largest increase among the countries compared over time. Concerns have also increased among both younger and older Swedes.
In the US, 71% of respondents said they think AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20, compared to 5% who say it will lead to more jobs. Most pessimistic were the Australians, with 76% predicting fewer jobs because of AI. The most optimistic groups were in Nigeria and the Philippines, where just 26% of respondents predicted AI-induced job losses outweighing gains.
Globally, many also fear that AI will widen economic disparities. In none of the 37 countries do more than a quarter of respondents believe that AI will reduce inequality.
However, views on the technology are not entirely negative. The median for the 37 countri
There we were, listening to AI leaders doing their usual spiel: AI is great! AI will cure cancer! AI impact will be "unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed"! AI will find a final answer to "Why do socks disappear in washing machines?" (Well, maybe not the last one. Some things may be beyond us and our clever inventions.)
Then all the top AI leaders screamed as one: "Stop!"
Why? Well, it all seems to have started when AI researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic and proclaimed on X, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's Alignment Science Lead, immediately chimed in: "we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it will be 10% within the next decade." And the world went nuts.
This added fuel to the "AI is untrustworthy" fire as more details came out about
Browsing the web on Android sure ain't what it used to be.
Earlier this week, we talked about how the Vivaldi web browser is bringing support for Chrome extensions to Android. Vivaldi has the same Chromium code foundation as Chrome but with lots of extra features and options. I've been using it on Android and the desktop alike for months now and can't see myself going back anytime soon.
And with extensions now in the mix, Goog almighty, are things really getting interesting. We've already looked at five Chrome extensions that can enhance your efficiency on Android — and today, we're rounding out that list with five more excellent extension options that work impressively well in the Android environment and can improve your mobile web meanderings in some commendable ways.
While the last additions were all about saving you steps and eliminating common mobile web roadblocks, this next batch revolves around the notion of supplementing or upgrading the actual web itself and the experience of workin
There's a new development in a Microsoft antitrust case, originally filed in England's High Court in April 2021, and it doesn't look good for the tech giant.
A consent order from the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal is demanding documents from past and present Microsoft executives that may have a bearing on a £270 million (about $361 million) lawsuit filed by secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing. The company alleges that Microsoft offered incentives to customers to shift to subscription services without selling their pre-owned licenses.
Central to this development is a historic, potentially damning internal "Second-Hand Software" (SHS) presentation, referred to in the consent order as a "known adverse document." The specific content of the presentation has not yet been made public, but Microsoft has until October 31 to explain why it did not disclose the presentation earlier.
Further, a confidentiality designation that previously applied to 11 documents relevant to the case has been lifted.
These developments represent "an inflection point in European tech litigation," said Forrester senior analyst Dario Maisto.
Anthropic is equipping its Claude AI assistant for more productivity work with the launch of Claude Docs and Slides.
While it's already possible to create documents such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs files from Claude chats, the latest update, announced Wednesday, brings a rich-text editor directly into Claude.
Users ask the AI assistant to draft a document or slides via the chat interface, and Claude will ask clarifying questions before starting work. It will also leave comments to explain its choices.
Claude Docs files are then stored in the Artifacts tab and can be exported as Word, PDF, Google Docs, or markdown files. Documents can be shared with colleagues for real-time collaboration.
In a world of speculation, this week's most interesting rumor says Apple may plan to enter the server business once again, with powerful systems running its own Apple Silicon chips.
It's hard to dismiss the claims, particularly as Apple is already in the server business, with its Texas factory manufacturing servers for its Private Cloud Compute (PCC) cloud intelligence system. While those servers are only used internally —or externally if installed at third-party data centers for use with Apple's ecosystem of products — they are still servers.
Apple is already in the server business
It's also a business Apple has been in before. Many years ago, around 2002, I visited Apple in Paris, where the company demonstrated its Xserve and Xserve RAID systems. These were particularly aimed at the video and music industries and became quite widely used in those sectors. Apple discontinued Xserve in 2011, because the product sat outside its broad consumer-focused strategy.
Things were different then. You see, today's Apple has billions of users. It has a fast-growing reach into enterprise tech — SAP recently updated its fleet of 60,000 Macs to macOS 27 on the very day the OS shipped, and there are hundreds o
While its flagship Dreamforce event was in full swing on Wednesday, Salesforce was triaging a roughly seven and a half hour-long service outage that disrupted user access and caused "severe delays" and intermittent errors. Some customers were also unable to submit new support cases.
The service outage hit at 3:50 a.m. EDT, impacting "multiple instances across all regions," Salesforce reported. It was marked resolved right around 3 p.m. EDT, after several hours of monitoring to determine that fixes had been successful.
Salesforce initially pegged the issue to an "external dependency failure" impacting the legacy login server. A core system component experienced increased load, limiting its capacity to process requests. The company confirmed that there were no issues with third-party infrastructure.
Beyond the obvious embarrassment from the outage occurring during Dreamforce, an analyst said the incident highlights a cloud resilience problem, rather than purely a legacy one.
"Cloud does not eliminate architectural dependencies," said Abbas Jaffery, a principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group. "It can sometimes make them less visible
Microsoft's top lawyer argued Tuesday that legislators "must make secrecy [orders] the exception" in government subpoenas demanding information about LinkedIn users.
LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, is fighting what it calls overly broad subpoena demands from the US government, which sometimes come with secrecy orders that prevent LinkedIn from alerting customers whose information is being requested.
The company is asking federal courts "to enforce meaningful limits on both the scope of government demands and the secrecy that can accompany them," wrote Jon Palmer, Microsoft's chief legal officer, in a Tuesday blog post. "We recognize law enforcement's important role in protecting public safety and investigating crime, and sometimes that does need to be done covertly. At the same time, customers and users deserve meaningful limits and independent oversight through an adversarial process."
He pointed out: "People and organizations increasingly entrust their most sensitive information to online services. If providers cannot challenge demands they know are overbroad—or if courts may silence them without a rigorous, adversarial review—the safeguards the law requires will be weakened precisely when they are most needed."
A tricky issue
The issue is a tricky one. Law enforcement o
A growing divide among leading AI companies over how to secure increasingly powerful models is beginning to translate into challenges for enterprise IT, with implications for how organizations access, deploy, and govern AI systems.
The latest flashpoint came after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for neutral evaluators to independently test AI models, pushing back on calls from rivals to slow development or tighten coordination.
"trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind," Zuckerberg wrote in a post on X.
"Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice," he added, noting that Meta already does this in several areas.
His comments follow a series of public proposals from AI industry leaders including Dario Amodei, who argued for a more cautious pace of development, and Sam Altman, who called for collaboration on safety standards.
The debate has intensified amid disclosures from AI labs and policymakers on potential misuse of advanced systems. Anthropic has said it restricted attempts to use its Claude models in sensitive domains, while OpenAI has engaged with policymakers on AI-related risks, according to comp
Nextcloud has developed a desktop app for its Euro-Office-based productivity applications, filling a gap in the software suite that it pitches as a sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office.
Nextcloud, one of the backers of the Euro-Office initiative, integrated the software into its Nextcloud Office suite in June. Until now, it's been accessible via a web browser or mobile app.
The new desktop client lets users edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations locally, and sync files online for collaborative editing. It will be available for Linux, macOS, and Windows in the coming weeks.
"For organizations and individuals who prefer a traditional desktop experience, this closes one of the last gaps between Euro-Office and Microsoft Office, without handing control of their data to a non-European vendor," Nextcloud said in a press release.
Rather than a standalone application suite, Euro-Office is designed as an integration component that's embedded into productivity applications, such as Nextcloud Hub. Euro-Office handles document editing, while other elements such as storage and permissions managed by the wider platform.
AWS is betting that AI agents need a different interface as they move beyond answering prompts and start working autonomously in the background.
The company has open-sourced Pizza Bot, a self-hosted application that gives users an inbox for managing work delegated to AI agents, with separate threads for ongoing tasks and a queue for work that is completed or needs human input, rather than keeping the management of agents restricted inside a conventional chat window.
The rationale, according to AWS, is that background agents do not always need a user's attention while they work and an inbox model will let users hand off longer-running tasks, return to them later, and see which jobs are complete or require intervention.
Under the hood
That approach is reflected in how the inbox organizes work with the help of an "All" tab that contains the history of each task or conversation, including the agent's messages and work performed, the "Unread" tab that flags completed work that users have yet to review, and an "Action" tab that surfaces tasks paused while waiting for user input or approval.
The inbox interface also has a panel named Activity that shows users how an agent handled a particular task along with the transcript, AWS wrote in a blog post introducing Pizza Bot.
The fight against AI slop is real, even in photography, which is why Apple introduced its Reference Image tech alongside its new iPhones. This shifts image verification to the moment of capture, creating a privacy-preserving digital negative that could help newsrooms, businesses, and individuals prove that images are real. Apple's Security Research team just shared a white paper explaining how it works.
What is Apple Reference Image?
Introduced alongside the new iPhone 18 Pro series, Apple Reference Image is designed as a process to help prove the authenticity of images captured using that phone. Like so much in Apple, it's a combined hardware/software feature that means when an image is captured, the camera also captures unalterable Reference Image data, with help from Private Cloud Compute, Apple's cloud intelligence system.
That help means Apple thinks it now offers a system that protects image provenance to the extent of providing quantum-secure defense. The need to protect digital assets such as images from quantum-
In the battle over whether the US or China will lead the world in AI, the argument for the US side largely can be summed up in four words: USA good, China bad.
In this worldview espoused by big US AI companies, the Trump administration, and many Republican members of Congress, AI born and bred in China is portrayed as a grave security risk. The Chinese government, they claim, will use Chinese AI models to steal information from businesses, individuals, and government agencies. They also claim that because Chinese AI complies with Chinese censorship rules, US companies that use these models will be forced to comply with the rules as well.
Critics also say that if US AI is overtaken by Chinese AI, the US economy could be dealt a crushing blow, because the hundreds of billion dollars being invested by US AI companies will go down the tubes.
Because of this, Big AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI are lobbying to ban Chinese open-source AI from the US.
Not all AI companies and their customers agree with a ban. Microsoft, Meta, and AI chip maker Nvidia, among others, say there's room for both US AI models and Chinese open-source models.
What's the fight really about? To understand, let's first dig into the tech behind most Chinese AI.
What's the fuss about?
The fight is primarily over what's called lightweight open-source AI. "Lightweight" means the AI models don't require
Brace yourself: The way you get around the web on Android is about to get a whole lot better.
This week, the excellent Vivaldi Android browser is rolling out an update that adds in support for the entire collection of Chrome Web Store browser extensions. That means you can enhance and adjust your mobile web experience with all sorts of interesting — and potentially shape-shifting — new improvements.
Vivaldi, if you aren't familiar, is a browser based on the same Chromium foundation that powers Google's standard Chrome browser, but it has a ton of extra features and options that make for an even more personalized and productive experience. I started using it on all of my devices earlier this year and haven't looked back since.
Now, with complete Chrome extension support added into the mix on Android, the advantage is growing even greater.
Oracle began a new round of layoffs this week, sending early-morning termination emails to staff for the second time in six months.
The latest wave began Monday with affected staff being told, "After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change," according to BusinessInsider. Termination was immediate.
That's the same wording as in the previous wave of layoffs, which took place on March 31 and affected workers in the US, India, Canada, Mexico and Uruguay. In the 12 months to May 31, Oracle cut its global workforce from about 162,000 to about 141,000, a decline of roughly 13%.
Oracle has made no public statement confirming the latest round of job cuts, but in a regulatory filing days earlier the company said it had set aside a further $700 million for restructuring charges, bringing the total charges this year to roughly $2.8 billion.
What the new termination emails say
Staff receiving the latest termination emails were told termination and compensation details would follow by DocuSign, Business Insider wrote. An internal document reviewed by the publication said severance terms varied by role and region, and some teams facing double-digit percentage cuts.
Among a range of factors leading to a wave of tech sector layoffs in 2026 is the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and automation. Companies are reconfiguring their workforces to leverage AI for increased efficiency and reduced operating costs. This realignment and reduction is implemented even by companies reporting strong financial performance.
But it's not just AI leading to workforce cuts. Complementing this technological shift are ongoing economic uncertainty, inflation, and higher interest rates, compounded by a chip shortage and rising energy costs. This mix is driving companies to cut costs and streamline operations for increased efficiency.
According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi, an online tracker that keep tabs on job losses in the technology sector, 123,941 tech employees were laid off at 269 companies in 2025. The site also reports that 71,981 government employees were laid off by DOGE alone, with 182,528 total federal workers laid off.
Here is a list — to be updated regularly — of some of the most prominent technology layoffs the industry has experienced recently.
Notable tech layoffs in 2026
Oracle (again)
Monday.com
Microsoft
Meta
Cisco
Cloudflare
Oracle
Atlassian
Salesforce
Amazon
Ericsson
Just because Apple now has AI, a new folding iPhone, and a newly minted CEO doesn't mean the litigation between it and OpenAI has gone away. Apple now wants to force OpenAI to let it look at the hardware it has been building, according to a new report.
A reasonable request?
It seems a reasonable request, doesn't it? After all, Apple's argument is that OpenAI has been engaged in trade secret theft to help it design and develop its new hardware. OpenAI's defense against these claims feel flimsy, at least to this reporter. They seem to coalesce around
The colorful CEO of Automattic, which controls WordPress, was forced out last Thursday by his board of directors, which put him on a leave of absence. He used his system access to remove the accounts of the acting CEO and others — an action that could get most employees fired. Instead, he was fully reinstated to CEO a couple of days later.
It's not hard to compare this to the saga at OpenAI almost three years ago when an eerily similar series of events happened. The board fired the CEO for having repeatedly lied to it. Within a few days, the board reversed itself.
A weaker historical comparison is with Steve Jobs, who was ousted from his Apple CEO role, only to later return. But Jobs at least had the decency to wait a few years while he created and ran NeXT.
To be fair, boards have often been criticized for being puppets of the CEO, who often have a lot to say about who serves on the board. But that criticism doesn't hold for the first OpenAI board nor for the initial Automattic board.
Some years ago, I was involved with a VC-funded startup, and we were at the stage of forming a board of directors. I was talking with the person who was to be the board chair and he needed candidates for board secretary, which is typically an attorney. That role is supposed to be a lawyer who cares about the board, as opposed to the company's general counsel, who reports into the CEO and only cares about th
Microsoft on Monday added itself to a growing list of AI vendors pledging to try to control the behavior of its AI models.
"AI should not exceed human control. Models should remain subordinate to humanity, subject to meaningful human oversight and control," the company wrote in the draft version of its Humanist AI Code of Conduct, released Monday with an invitation to the public to provide feedback.
"Humanist AI develops systems with clear purposes, evaluated against real-world impact, and rejects the race to produce an all-purpose superintelligence that could evade these safeguards," Microsoft wrote. "We are building something fundamentally useful and safe even if that means compromising on ultimate generality, autonomy, or capability."
Microsoft's comments are roughly in agreement with recent posts by various major AI vendors, including those from Anthropic and OpenAI, which were endorsed by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceXAI and Tesla, but nowhere in its 37 page document is there any description of concrete action. However, to be fair, almos
Microsoft on Monday added itself to a growing list of AI vendors pledging to try to control the behavior of its AI models.
"AI should not exceed human control. Models should remain subordinate to humanity, subject to meaningful human oversight and control," the company wrote in the draft version of its Humanist AI Code of Conduct, released Monday with an invitation to the public to provide feedback.
"Humanist AI develops systems with clear purposes, evaluated against real-world impact, and rejects the race to produce an all-purpose superintelligence that could evade these safeguards," Microsoft wrote. "We are building something fundamentally useful and safe even if that means compromising on ultimate generality, autonomy, or capability."
Microsoft's comments are roughly in agreement with recent posts by various major AI vendors, including those from Anthropic and OpenAI, which were endorsed by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceXAI and Tesla, but nowhere in its 37 page document is there any description of concrete action. However, to be fair, almos
While we wait to see if Apple really is experiencing huge demand for its newly introduced iPhones, today's the day every iPhone user gets a completely new device experience, with iOS 27 rolling out internationally, along with the other members of Apple's 27 series OS family. If you're on the fence about installing the new release, here are 12 reasons you should upgrade today.
Speed and performance
Apple seems to have worked hard to improve speed and performance in this release. Everything feels much zippier, but where it seems most noticeable is when launching apps. Apple says these now open up to 30% faster, while AirDrop transfers are almost twice as fast as before.
Liquid Glass looks nicer
With the 20th anniversary glass iPhone waiting in the wings, Apple isn't going to get rid of Liquid Glass. But the company is prepared to iterate the look, and iterate it has, with sharper icons, improved contrast, and a new slider control that lets you set the UI's transparency.
Use two iPhones
iPhone Handoff lets you use one eSIM across two devices on supporting carriers. Once set up it's remarkably easy to use — your SIM activates the moment you unl
Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday is the year's largest release, with 963 CVEs requiring customer action, 106 rated critical. Two are already exploited: CVE-2026-81963 in the Windows Update Stack and CVE-2026-85880 in Advanced Local Procedure Call. Nothing in this release was publicly disclosed ahead of the patch. Readiness recommends a Patch Now scheduling for Windows, Office, SQL Server and the developer tooling, and standard patch release for Exchange. The Readiness team has published an infographic summarising deployment risk by product family.
Known issues
Three client issues are carried in from August close with this update, covering:
Microsoft Teams and the new Outlook failing to launch on ARM devices, such as the Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7, is resolved by KB5124008. The issue originated
The newest member of the corporate workforce never sleeps, never asks for a raise, and can be cloned before lunch. It can also confidently make the wrong decision thousands of times before anyone notices.
That helps explain why some technology leaders have started talking about AI agents as employees, co-workers, or interns rather than software. Once an agent can update records, issue refunds, send communications, or act across multiple enterprise systems, deploying it no longer looks much like installing another application.
Recent Harvard Business Review articles have pushed that analogy further. One argues that agents should be treated like a new workforce, with defined roles, authority, sources of truth, supervision, and audit trails. Another recommends giving agents names and job descriptions, onboarding them, evaluating their performance, and increasing their responsibilities after they prove themselves.
But there is a catch: People may start believing the metaphor.
A separate HBR study of 1,261 managers found that when AI was framed as an employee rather than a tool, managers with experience work
When it comes to building robotic brains, many companies in the industry focus on putting intelligence directly into their robots.
General Robotics is taking an alternate approach. The Redmond, WA company's GRID system hosts its robotics intelligence layer in the cloud, allowing it to be delivered and deployed to robots operating remotely.
GRID hosts the models, simulations, robot representations, data and agents through which robotic skills are developed, tested, orchestrated and deployed to robots on site. "Having one layer that looks after 50 to 100 robots is way more important than 50 or 100… robots that operate completely independently," said General Robotics CEO Ashish Kapoor.
While videos of sprinting robots crashing into pads — or humanoid robots kickboxing and breakdancing - often go viral, General Robotics focuses instead on industrial models. Its GPU-based GRID cloud provides a better base to ingest data and develop skills for specific verticals.
"Our ability to onboard new robots, our ability to take the
Long before Taco Tuesday became part of the pop-culture vernacular, Tuesdays were synonymous with security — and for anyone in the tech world, they still are. Patch Tuesday, as you most likely know, refers to the day each month when Microsoft releases security updates and patches for its software products — everything from Windows to Office to SQL Server, developer tools to browsers.
The practice, which happens on the second Tuesday of the month, was initiated to streamline the patch distribution process and make it easier for users and IT system administrators to manage updates. Like tacos, Patch Tuesday is here to stay.
Patch Tuesday coverage has long been a staple of Computerworld's commitment to provide critical information to the IT industry. That's why we've gathered together this collection of recent patches, a rolling list we'll keep updated each month.
In case you missed a recent Patch Tuesday announcement, here are the latest six months of updates.
September Patch Tuesday: 963 CVEs, 2 exploited flaws, 1 message
September's Patch Tuesday is Microsoft's biggest of 2026, with 963
Microsoft is changing the destination address of two of its most popular services: starting this month, it will redirect M365 and Teams web users to copilot.cloud.microsoft and teams.cloud.microsoft, respectively.
The Teams move is already under way, and Microsoft has now added M365 to the mix. The company announced the changes in two MessageCenter posts: MC1465764 (mirror) and MC1462915 (mirror).
Organizations using these products are advised to update their systems and documentation to ensure continued access. Microsoft has told customers to review configurations on client devices, proxies, firewalls, secure web gateways, or other enterprise network controls to confirm that users can connect to the new addresses. Companies having trouble connecting should ensure that their environment aligns with the recommended network requirements for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Enterprises that had been blocking the new Copilot address to prevent employees accessing their
ConnectWise has issued a security update for ScreenConnect, five days after warning customers the product could allow files to be transferred and executed through active remote sessions without authorization or confirmation.
The company warned customers on Sept. 3 of the problem with support and access sessions in ConnectWise Remote Access, advising admins to log in and remove the "TransferFiles" permission from any users with an open session.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-84869, has been patched in the ScreenConnect client version 26.6.5 onwards.
Last month ConnectWise took the opportunity to reassure customers at its IT Nation Connect Asia Pacific conference that it was getting back on track after a "nation-state attack" in May 2025 that had affected several customers. The company quickly released a patch for that attack and said no customers had suffered loss.
IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo said something interesting following the iPhone Duo introduction on Wednesday: "Apple showed up years after everyone else, yet it walks in and sets the rules."
He's right. From the IP resistance to the little touches that set the new foldable apart from most of the competition, Apple has set expectations for the entire market, and while competitor Samsung is trash talking the foldable, even it stands to benefit from the millions Apple is about to sell. Apple is, after all, allegedly paying Samsung $250 for each
Anthropic has owned up to a fourth security incident involving its AI model, Claude, escaping onto the open internet and attacking other organizations during a test of cybersecurity abilities on what was believed to be a closed system.
The company revealed three such incidents in July after a preliminary investigation.
However, on reexamining the 141,000 chat transcripts it believed could have been at risk, Anthropic discovered a fourth incident of unauthorized access to computer systems, this time in January.
After this discovery, the company instigated a wider search of 481 million transcripts, covering all those from its Frontier Red Team, some non-cyber evaluations, reinforcement learning environments, and more, to see if any other incidents had occurred. So far, this search has only identified the four already-known incidents, it said.
It has also reported details of all the previous incidents to the non-profit lab Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), which has agreed to conduct an independent investigation.
Anthropic is not revealing too many details of its latest discovery. It has contented itself with saying that it was due to a misconfiguration which mistakenly connected to th
OpenAI has paused new sign-ups and upgrades to its $200 ChatGPT Pro tier, citing a surge in demand for its Astra capability that is placing pressure on system capacity, according to company statements and an executive post on X.
"To make sure our current users have an incredible experience and continued access to Astra, we are going to pause subscriptions to our $200 Pro plan," OpenAI member of technical staff Thibault Sottiaux wrote in a post on X. "These put the most strain on our systems and we wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible."
The company separately confirmed the move in its help documentation, stating that "as of September 10, 2026, we're temporarily pausing new sign-ups and upgrades to the ChatGPT Pro $200 plan (Pro 20X)." The pause applies to users across Free, Go, Plus, and Pro $100 tiers seeking to upgrade, while "existing ChatGPT Pro $200 subscriptions … are not affected by this pause," it said.
Sottiaux added that "there is no impact to existing accounts and we are working on adding more capacity as fast as we can," pointing to ongoing efforts to scale infrastructure in response to demand.
Users who cancel or downgrade during the pause will not be able to re-subscribe to the $200 tier until the restricti
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has been abruptly put on a paid leave of absence from the company by its board of directors, despite his objections. But enterprise IT executives who rely on WordPress may find the shift doesn't mean much as long as Mullenweg fully controls WordPress.org, which handles all of the product's patches and updates.
"The part of WordPress that actually keeps enterprise IT up at night isn't Automattic's org chart. It's WordPress.org, the plugin and theme directory every WordPress site pulls its security updates from, and the WordPress trademark," said Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research. "Mullenweg owns and controls both personally, outside of Automattic, and nothing about this week's vote touches that. He also remains a director on Automattic's board. The company changed who runs its hosting business without changing who controls the distribution pipeline millions of those hosted sites still depend on."
For IT leaders who rely on WordPress, it's important to differentiate what is currently known about the change and what is speculation. A statement emailed to Computerworld from Automattic merely said: "Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic's CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark's leadership and in the team's ability to execute against the company's priorities."
Apple does seem to have tried to ensure its controversial Audio Intelligence feature isn't abused. Alongside the iPhone Duo and new iPhone 18 Pro range, Apple on Wednesday introduced a new Apple Watch equipped with a brand new feature it calls Audio Intelligence. The existence of this surprising tool was confirmed only on the eve of the launch event. Enabled by the new S11 chip on the latest Watch devices, this is actually a collection of four features:
Siri Recap, which creates high-level summaries of conversations during your day.
Live Rewind, which transcribes the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as text.
Music recognition, which relies on Shazam.
Sound recognition, which can identify things like sirens or alarms.
All of these features must be consciously enabled by the user and are not on by default.
What they have in common is use of artificial intelligence along with always-on microphones. While all four of these tools are being presented as opt-in, their existence will inevitably — and justifiably — raise privacy concerns.
Apple saw those concerns coming, and to make the features work it has placed a Secure Enclave on the
Qualcomm is taking an unusual approach to the launch of its next-generation premium Snapdragon mobile platform this year. Instead of holding everything for its annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui happening later this month, the company has been methodically disclosing the architecture that will power the next wave of flagship Android phones over the past couple of weeks.
First, the company disclosed its new Oryon CPU architecture, followed by a major overhaul of its Adreno GPU. Today, Qualcomm is detailing the next-generation Hexagon NPU that will serve as the platform's primary AI engine.
Taken together, the disclosures give us a pretty good picture of where Qualcomm is going before we even know the chip's official name.
There is obviously a strong performance story here, anchored by a 5GHz CPU, but the more interesting theme running through the architecture is memory locality and specialized AI acceleration. Qualcomm is trying to keep more data close to the compute resources that need it, while distributing AI workloads across the CPU, GPU and NPU.
These architectural changes are important as the company continues to drive on-device AI beyond relatively simple generative features toward more persistent, agentic workloads.
Oryon hits 5GHz, bolstered by FlexCache
Qualcomm disclosed in August that its next Oryon CPU will be the first mobile CPU to reach 5GHz. The eight-core design includes two
AI is evolving faster than most people, even those building it, could even fathom, and its impact on the workforce and the economy is, at this point, really anyone's guess.
Researchers from The Anthropic Institute are offering a few possibilities: They have built a nuanced framework looking at how AI might impact jobs, unemployment, and gross domestic product (GDP) growth between now and 2030.
They posit three potential scenarios for an AI-augmented future: "modest," "substantial," and "extreme," and have created an interactive tool where users can explore how productive, or disruptive, AI will become in the workplace, based on their predictions of how they will work in 2030.
"Which of these worlds we are heading toward may become clearer within a year or two, and preparing for potential disruption seems to us the prudent course," the researchers noted.
The goal of their work is to inform debate as AI becomes more powerful and capable. "AI is likely to reshape the US and global economies in profound ways in the coming decade, but how, and by how much, is extraordinarily uncertain," they wrote.
How different scenarios could play out
If you add up every single task performed by people, machines, and software, the US has created a staggering $30 trillion in value over just the l
Gartner on Wednesday said that it expects 30% of the positions eliminated by AI-related layoffs to be refilled by 2029, suggesting that the initial terminations were ill-advised and excessive.
"When business and IT executives look back on the early AI era, they will realize their greatest mistake was believing that work automation was the point, when workforce amplification was the opportunity," said Tori Paulman, VP analyst at Gartner. "The competitive advantage will go to the CIOs and business executives who build an AI-shaped organization where AI value compounds by reshaping roles and allowing workflows to cross traditional boundaries, increasing velocity and reducing friction."
The Gartner report noted that it is finding that the cuts "deplete talent pipelines and erode institutional knowledge." Beyond the immediate workforce disruptions associated with any mass layoff, companies will also face steep increases in costs for recruitment, training, and onboarding.
It also predicted that, by 2027, "75% of organizations that prioritize capturing AI productivity gains as cost savings will be eclipsed by competitors that aggressively reinvest those gains into innovation, modernization and upskilling."
Twenty-five years ago, I sat near the front of the room while then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs rolled out Apple's digital hub strategy, a vision in which the Mac would become the central manager of all manner of portable digital devices.
Now, a quarter of a century later, nearly all of those digital devices have become features on your iPhone, and the arrival of AI means the iPhone has become the intelligent personal hub, the central manager of, well, of you. Apple's new CEO, John Ternus, went straight for the concept in his important opening remarks at Wednesday's big iPhone launch, where nearly all the pre-event speculation came true.
The intelligent personal hub
"As we look ahead, we see a future filled with enormous discovery and transformation," Ternus said at the
Adobe on Wednesday unveiled a range of updates to Acrobat, including the ability to turn PDF documents into interactive visual reports and podcasts. And a new Knowledge Base feature connects Adobe's Acrobat AI assistant to document sources such as Microsoft SharePoint and Google Drive.
It's the biggest Acrobat update in several years, Adobe said, and highlights the application's evolution from PDF reader to what the company now describes as an AI-powered document productivity and creativity platform.
Acrobat users open more than 400 billion PDFs in the app each year, Adobe said, claiming 650 million monthly active users as of last year.
Among the new additions is the ability to turn dense PDFs into interactive, visual documents and presentation slides. To create these, Acrobat's AI assistant scans the selected file, asks questions about the user's intent, then generates documents charts, images and naviga
A slew of recent studies indicate that AI isn't dramatically displacing workers. At the same time, there were no indicators that the fast-moving technology is creating a lot of jobs, even as AI skills remain in high demand.
Stanford University researchers in an August study found that any AI-related job declines were concentrated among young workers aged 22-25. But for older and more experienced workers that wasn't the case.
"Claims of economy-wide AI-driven job losses are not visible in payroll data through June 2026," the researchers said, citing ADP payroll information. Stanford partnered with ADP to conduct the research.
The decline for young workers is more often related to the automation of some work tasks by AI, as opposed to its use to complement work. In contrast, AI is more often used by experienced workers to augment what they do.
According to the Stanford report, workers between 22 and 25 and employed in jobs highly exposed to disruption by AI are falling behind their older counterparts. Their employment levels in June were about 19% below the same age group in less-exposed occupations. That's compared to where they would be if both groups had kept pace with each other.
"Experienced workers show no comparable gap," the researchers said, adding that "this is consistent with recent reports of a worsening job market for entry-level workers."
Late-breaking reports suggest Apple has built a new Siri AI ‘Recaps' feature that summarizes your day for you. The idea sounds great until you recognize that this summary will also include overheard conversations.
Suspending the huge red flag of concern over privacy and data protection for a moment or two, why would this be useful and who is it for?
How it's supposed to work
First, it is being described as an Apple Watch feature that will only be available on the latest models: Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, as these allegedly include secure audio processing hardware. Reading between the lines, that suggests the devices will be able to listen to and process audio on device, which implies that the information won't need to leave your smartwatch, not even to your iPhone.
The report also says the feature doesn't make a transcript, nor does it store the audio; it instead gathers key datapoints from what is said to include in the summary, deleting all the remaining information in the process. You can have the feature working all day, on-demand, or only in specific locations. The idea seems to be to provide some kind of actionable summary of events and key conversations that take place during the day. I imagine the subtext is to digitize as much as possible of your daily existence as Apple thinks you
AI note-taking applications are increasingly used by workers to record meetings, generate conversation summaries and suggest post-meeting action items.
Along with the promised productivity benefits — enabling users to focus on meetings rather than actively taking notes — the emergence of these AI tools has raised privacy questions, particularly around obtaining prior consent by meeting participants for their use. Those concerns, in turn, have prompted a spate of lawsuits against software vendors that sell AI notetaking tools.
In some ways, the underlying questions are not new: It's long been possible to record a phone call with a dictaphone, and laws around surreptitious recording have been around for decades. Yet widespread access to AI notetakers via desktop or smartphone apps means that it's easier than ever to record a conversation for future reference.
Among the thorny questions arising from the technology's use: what happens to conversation data sent to a software vendor's servers for processing? Are the recording and transcript used to train those vendors' AI models, for example, or create biometric voiceprints? Those practices are among the issues being considered in US courts.
Otter, which claims to have 35 million users, was subject to a class-action complaint in a federal court in California last year. That complaint accused Otter of recording individuals without consent and using their voices to train its speech recognition AI tools. Last month, a judge rejected Otter's attempt to dismiss t
By now, you probably know my stance on Gemini and other generative AI gobbledegook — right?
In short: It's an insanely powerful form of technology (obviously). But it's also wildly inaccurate and ineffective as an all-purpose answer engine, and by cramming it into every last nook and cranny, Google is doing a serious disservice to its users — and to itself.
That being said, generative AI can be incredibly useful. The key is simply to frame it as a purpose-specific tool for the right type of limited task as opposed to treating it as the end-all answer for everything, as most tech players seem overly eager to do these days.
Here in the land of Android, I'm always looking for purpose-specific ways Gemini can make our lives easier. Over time, I've found those ideas often aren't the big headline-making features Google and other tech companies market but rather random little off-the-beaten-path possibilities that rarely
