Browsing: Tech Reviews

It’s not every day that attackers can force a frontier AI model to cough up user passwords and other sensitive data without user confirmation. That’s exactly what researchers recently did to Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise. Even more unusual is the source they tapped to discover the critical vulnerability that made their exploit possible. Rather than employing reverse engineering or other traditional vulnerability-hunting methods, they asked Copilot. The LLM assistant readily complied. Researchers at security firm Varonis knew they wanted to create an exploit that would exfiltrate user data when a user did nothing more than click on a link. Like…

The company will most likely manufacture its Pixel devices in Vietnam and India starting in 2027, Nikkei Asia says. Sam Rutherford for Engadget Google will no longer manufacture any Pixel device in China starting next year, according to Nikkei Asia. The company has been expanding its production capacity in Vietnam and India in recent years, but most of its manufacturing still takes place in China. Now, Google has reportedly told its suppliers that it will be moving the production of all Pixel phones, watches and earbuds outside of China starting in 2027.  Nikkei Asia reported back…

A new analysis of the 60 largest data centers under construction in the US by Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft estimates the sites could produce a cumulative 101.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually once they’re fully up and running, Financial Times reports. That’s about 7% of all 2025 US power-sector emissions. Put another way, it’s the equivalent of running 27 coal power plants or putting 24 million more gas-powered cars on the road. The backlash against America’s data center and artificial intelligence boom has been building for a while now, reaching a fever pitch over water use, land grabs…

The ideas that we take for granted in today’s computing landscape were once all original thoughts that somebody had to devise and implement out of nothing. Both Apple and Microsoft were pioneering companies in this space, but not all great ideas that stuck necessarily came from either company. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” — Bill Gates, November 1983 Best…

Nvidia has disclosed that it owns nearly 123 million shares in SpaceX, further highlighting the chipmaker’s entangled financial relationships with some of its biggest customers. The $5.5 trillion company owned SpaceX stock worth nearly $21 billion at the end of June, according to an SEC filing on Friday. Elon Musk’s rocket conglomerate’s shares have fallen sharply since its June initial public offering, meaning Nvidia’s stake would now be worth $17 billion. The disclosure marks a huge pay-off on Nvidia’s investment in xAI, completed in January, shortly before Musk combined the AI lab with SpaceX.Read full article Comments

The cuts were made even after a preview model went rogue and hacked Hugging Face. Samuel Bovin/Shutterstock As part of a restructuring, OpenAI reportedly disbanded its “preparedness” team that assesses the potential for catastrophic risks with its models, The Financial Times reported. The Sam Altman-led company is said to have made the move at the end of last month, despite the fact that several of its models recently went rogue and hacked the AI tool repository, Hugging Face. Senior staff within separate teams have now been assigned responsibility for different areas of preparedness like bio and…

Disney’s biennial fan convention D23 is in full swing, and the entertainment giant has finally revealed details on all the new lands, rides, theming, shows, restaurants and attraction names that it has planned for Disney parks in the next few years. During the Disney Experiences Showcase at the Honda Center in Anaheim on Saturday night, we heard all about Villains Land, Piston Peak, Tropical Americas Land, Avengers Campus, Monstropolis, the Coco ride, new Disney Cruise line ships and a much-needed Tomorrowland overhaul. Here’s the biggest news announced. Villains Land at Disney World Corinne Reichert/CNET The villains-themed expansion of Magic Kingdom…

The Tesla Optimus, also known as the Tesla Bot, is one of an entire catalogue of humanoid robots that manufacturers have unveiled in the last few years. Humanoid robots may look the part, and while they may be a few years away from maturation, executives like Tesla CEO Elon Musk are adamant they’re a direct substitute for human labor. “[The Tesla Bot] has the potential to be a generalized substitute for human labor over time. The foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is essentially distilled labor… The fundamental constraint is labor. There are not enough people. I can’t…

After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years. As reported this week by Current, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, St. Louis affiliate Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking access to the data. In the litigation filed in Denver District Court, Nine PBS says that its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), used one of Iron Mountain’s Denver data centers to store the channel’s data. However,…

We think it’s kind of neat. Wongsakorn 2468/Shutterstock Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 can already track your heart rate, sleep and workouts. But that’s not enough information about you, apparently. Its Antioxidant Index turns a five-second thumb scan into a score from 0 to 100. The watch isn’t measuring all of the antioxidants in your body. Instead, it estimates carotenoids, pigments with antioxidant properties found in yellow, orange and green fruits and vegetables that can build up in your skin. Samsung uses that reading as an indicator of fruit and vegetable intake, though the company says UV…