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 Apple retired the iPhone Upgrade Program in favor of a new Apple Upgrade leasing option made available in partnership with Klarna. Apple Upgrade gives customers an option to get iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches at cheaper prices than before, but there are some things worth knowing about it.
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Two Massachusetts journalists were harassed by a Silicon Valley security team in a case that raised questions about when executives should be held responsible.
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that policymakers should keep lower-risk open-weight AI accessible while placing stricter safeguards around frontier systems, including mandatory testing and limits on China's access to advanced computing and model capabilities.
In a post outlining Anthropic's position, Amodei said broad restrictions, including bans on Chinese open-weight models used by US businesses, would not address his main national security concerns. Instead, he pointed to the possibility of authoritarian governments surpassing the US in advanced AI, as well as cyber, biological, and alignment risks posed by increasingly capable systems.
Amodei also called for action against industrial-scale model distillation, which he said allows Chinese developers to improve their models with less computing power than would be needed to train comparable systems from scratch.
The statement followed criticism of Anthropic for not signing an industry letter backed by Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Mistral, Hugging Face and other technology companies urging policymakers to avoid premature restrictions on open-weight models.
The letter said that open wei
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The 19th-century French novelist Honore de Balzac is believed to have said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
That's even more true today than it was 200 years ago — just look at how Big AI, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others have built their trillion-dollar fortunes.
They all use vast amounts of copyrighted material to train their large language models (LLMs) without paying the copyright holders. In other words, they steal it. They don't call it stealing, though. They call it "fair use," which in this case amounts to the same thing.
Generative AI (genAI) training requires massive amounts of text. The better-written and more information-dense that text is, the more it helps. AI gets a lot smarter a lot faster when it's trained on well-written books and magazine and newspaper articles than when it's trained on social media banter (or most everything else you find on the internet).
Since the dawn of AI, companies have been hoovering up copyrighted material wherever they find it — on the open web, behind paywalls, even in manually scanned books — and then used the scanned text. And they do it all without asking authors' or publishers' permissions, and without paying them.
It's the greatest intellectual property theft in history by a long shot — billions and b
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 Apple today shared the full-length trailer for season four of its hit series Ted Lasso, ahead of the season premiere on Wednesday, August 5. Following the premiere, one new episode will be released every Wednesday through October 7.
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 Apple plans to release an all-new smart home hub at some point between October and early next year, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
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Traveling enterprise employees beware: Think twice before you log onto that oh-so-convenient public Wi-Fi.
Since at least June, threat actors have been compromising "captive" Wi-Fi gateways and other portal appliances at hotels, conference centers, and similar shared venues to hijack users' Microsoft 365 accounts, according to the ReliaQuest Threat Research team.
Once a threat actor controls a gateway, they can silently redirect a user's traffic to their own infrastructure and steal their Microsoft 365 credentials without ever touching the user's device, compromising endpoints, or sending phishing links or malicious attachments.
"The most dangerous element is that it operates at the network gateway, which sits beneath most of the trust assumptions users and devices make," ReliaQuest told CSO Online. "It's not necessarily an enterprise breach level event on its own, but it's a very real risk to individual accounts."
Exploiting a ‘fundamental trust'
Domain Name System (DNS) poisoning, in which false data is injected to redirect regular web traffic to fraudulent domains, has previously been observed on small office routers, but attackers are now expanding the technique to higher-level targets, the ReliaQuest researchers explained in a blog post.
Attackers l
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Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 reportedly found Redis flaws and built RCE exploits, raising urgent patching and AI security concerns.
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But as some reviewers have noted, the boosts from DLSS aren't always as impressive in real life as they are in marketing materials. And it's often less powerful systems—like gaming laptops—that see the most modest benefits. So, I decided to test it out myself.
Here are my Nvidia DLSS 4 results on a gaming laptop. Keep reading for the exact laptop I used and the various gains (or lack thereof) I saw in a handful of different high-profile games.
The laptop I used for these tests
When Nvidia boasted about the awe-inspiring eight-fold improvement in Cyberpunk 2077 performance, those tests were done under ideal conditions. According to the fine print, it was achieved on a PC with an RTX 5090 at 4K resolutions with all the graphical bells and whistles turned on, and in DLSS performance mode.
But that's far from your typical gaming PC. Most modern gaming PCs are budget laptops—like the Lenovo LO
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Sometimes you can notice the signs of a failing SSD. For instance, the once-quick transfer speed slows to crawl, there are frequent program or system crashes, or file system access errors or SMART errors occur. If you notice these things, especially in combination, there's a good chance your SSD is on its way out. In that case, it's time to prepare for the worst and do the following:
Back up critical files
It goes without saying that the first thing you'll want to do if you think your SSD is on the blink is to back up your critical data. Backups should be done regularly anyway, but even if you're doing that, you'll still want to make a new backup of your critical files at this point to have them ready to go should your SSD suddenly die.
See our roundups of the best Windows backup software and
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