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NEW RESOURCES Notebook Check: A designer just put 1,300 restored 19th-century wildlife illustrations online for free. "Nicholas Rougeux is a well-known designer whose previous restoration projects include Euclid's Elements, Pierre-Joseph Redouté's Les […]
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Apple's outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, bade an emotional farewell to analysts and shareholders on Thursday as the company announced a record June quarter. His successor, John Ternus, takes over at the beginning of September with the company seemingly in solid shape.
The results were impressive, though some worrying challenges were confirmed. Apple managed to set a new June quarter record, but acknowledged slowing services growth and an unexpected mishap in forecasting future demand. Mac sales jumped an absolutely astonishing 28.7%, as the MacBook Neo grabbed consumer imagination, and overall the company saw growth everywhere except the iPad.
Apple's fiscal Q3 2026 results saw the company generate $109.4 billion in revenue, up 16% year-over-year for a net quarterly profit of $29.8 billion. Gross margin for the quarter was 50.1%, compared to 46.5% in the year-ago quarter (though two points of this was attributed to tariff returns).
More specifically:
iPhone sales were up 21.7%, an unusually high number for what is traditionally a slower quarter.
Wearables increased 6.5%.
Services revenue increased 12%.
And the iPad declined 5.9%.
The Mac is out the bottle
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A prominent Norwegian AI researcher on Tuesday posted details about an AI worm that is wreaking havoc in various Microsoft applications, including Word and Copilot.
The report from noted Norwegian AI researcher Håkon Måløy, now confirmed by Microsoft, said that an attacker can conceal instructions in a document that is later used as source material for Copilot-generated or Copilot-edited Word documents, for example, as input to a financial report. Those malicious instructions could potentially alter figures in the document being created. They then copy themselves into the new document, causing it to become a carrier of the attack when used in another Copilot-assisted workflow.
Måløy noted: "To my knowledge, this is among the first public demonstrations of document-borne AI-worm self-propagation through normal workflows in a mainstream commercial productivity suite."
Microsoft on Thursday emailed a statement to CSOonline discussing the report's revelations.
"We have addressed the findings reported by the researcher and thank them for working with us through coordinated vulnerability disclosure. To address this class of risk, we use a defense-in-depth strategy with safeguards that block malicious instructions at multiple points and help keep tasks aligned with users' re
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Now that Apple has opened up choice to third-party browsers as part of its efforts to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, we can expect a new focus on browser market share in the near future.
Third-party browsers have been supported in iOS since version 14. What's changed is that Apple must now offer EU users a choice of which browser becomes the default when they use their device. Apple clearly didn't want to do this as WebKit (which drives Safari) is fundamental to many of the technologies and solutions the company packs inside its iPhones. (I think it's likely to stay that way.)
To read this article in full, please click here
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