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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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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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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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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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