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 As expected, the Apple Upgrade program launched today, allowing customers in the U.S. to lease most iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac models. While the program is offered by Apple, the leasing is handled by financing company Klarna.
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Claude Mythos Preview discovered new attacks in testing against weakened cryptographic algorithms, which protect online financial transactions, private communications and more.
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The program will take the sting out of owning Apple devices, including Macs, iPads and Apple Watches.
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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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Nvidia is investing a reported $5 billion in Ilya Sutskever's SSI and providing Vera Rubin systems for a tenfold increase in AI compute.
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 There's a big accessory sale happening on Amazon this week, with the year's best prices on Anker chargers, Samsung monitors, Sonos audio products, and much more.
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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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 OpenAI's hardware roadmap has sharpened considerably in recent months, with its first device now identified, a smartphone said to be arriving as soon as next year, and a wider lineup taking shape behind them.
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It's part of a national security strategy to kickstart domestic production of emerging technology.
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NEW RESOURCES Arch Daily: aflalo/gasperini arquitetos launches a free digital archive of its most iconic works. "Bringing together some of the firm's most iconic projects developed between 1955 and the present day, […]
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AI PROBLEMS Politico: Emails show how Virginia regulators downplayed data center health concerns. "When Virginia's top environmental regulator received an analysis warning of data center pollution, it took him less than five […]
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Better bass and a much newer processor are the main differences between the old Echo Dot and the newer Echo Dot Max.
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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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The chipmaking giant is in talks with OpenAI to provide a $250 billion financial backstop for the project, which would be among the largest of the A.I. boom.
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 Meta today announced Facebook Verified, a free badge designed to confirm that a Facebook profile belongs to a real person rather than an AI-generated fake.
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The Fair Price Protection Act is intended to stop stores from using personal data to set individualized prices.
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Traditional phishing techniques are in decline as a result of the disruption of the Tycoon2FA phishing-as-a-service (PHaaS) platform, Microsoft said in a new report, "Email threat landscape: Q2 2026 trends and insights".
"Phishing volume linked to the platform fell 92% from pre-disruption averages, including QR code phishing and CAPTCHA-gated phishing both declining from their March highs," the company wrote in the report.
The takedown reduced activity across multiple phishing categories, forcing attackers to shift to newer delivery methods.
Riding this shift in were a few notable phishing campaigns, including an automated business email compromise (BEC) campaign that reached 42,000 organizations in under three hours, and a multi-stage phishing campaign that used nested email (EML) files, calendar invitations, and a Microsoft authentication redirect to deliver malware.
To counter phishing attacks, Microsoft recommends blocking emails containing known bad URLs/ subject fields, enabling password-less authentication methods, or moving to
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Just in time for the iPhone's 20th anniversary, Apple is moving closer to becoming a service company. It is set to launch its new deal with Klarna next week and when it does, Apple enthusiasts in the US will effectively be able to subscribe to their favorite Apple hardware, with the cost spread across up to three years.
This matters because when combined with Apple One and Apple's Creator Studio subscriptions, the Klarna arrangement brings Apple closer to offering a full subscription model for hardware, software, and services. The only thing you don't get under the new arrangement is AppleCare, for which you'll allegedly need to pay extra.
Moving closer to hardware-as-a-service
Apple has slowly been transitioning toward hardware-as-a-service for almost a decade. Back then, Forrester analyst Frank Gillet predicted the company would eventually offer bundles of services and products for a monthly, all-in, fee.
This isn't quite where we are yet; you still need at least three subscriptions to get close. But, after the better part of a
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NEW RESOURCES Poynter: Poynter's PolitiFact launches service providing reliable, engaging health information to consumers and news organizations. "The service, called Well Informed, offers reliable, topical health information on social media, where more […]
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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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