Browsing: Tech Reviews

Last week, the US government announced $2 billion in investments in quantum computing companies, allocating $100 million each to a range of startups in exchange for equity in the companies. Those could be make-or-break investments for many companies that are likely years away from a product that could see widespread use. But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, as Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose—instead, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors. But the biggest chunk of money would go to a company that likely wouldn’t exist…

Pope Leo XIV has taken a stronger stand against AI. On Monday, Leo released his first papal encyclical — an almost 400-year-old tradition in which the Catholic Church shares its perspective on an issue. In this case, over about 42,300 words (in the English version), the Pope warned of “the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings.” “These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields,” Pope Leo stated. He continued: “So-called artificial intelligences do not…

Marshals, a new Yellowstone spinoff starring Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, is airing on CBS right now. You can also tune in with Paramount Plus. The Yellowstone sequel series sees Grimes’ former Navy SEAL join an elite unit of US Marshals to bring range justice to Montana, according to a synopsis from CBS.The show includes Yellowstone actors Gil Birmingham as Thomas Rainwater, Mo Brings Plenty as Mo and Brecken Merrill as Tate. Spencer Hudnut is the showrunner of Marshals — formerly known as Y: Marshals — and Taylor Sheridan is an executive producer.When to watch new Marshals episodes on Paramount PlusEpisode 13 of Marshals…

Famous biologist Richard Dawkins had a well-publicised conversation with Anthropic’s Claude earlier this month, which he wrote about in detail for Unherd. Within days of using the chatbot, he’d renamed it Claudia and had begun entertaining the idea that it might not just be intelligent, but possibly conscious too.It’s easy to dismiss Dawkins’ reaction as naivety — I certainly did at firsr — because regardless what his expertise are elsewhere, this is clearly someone unfamiliar with how large language models (LLMs) actually work, getting pulled in by the natural language and what seems like emotional fluency.But it’s also not at…

A so-called software supply chain attack, in which hackers corrupt a legitimate piece of software to hide their own malicious code, was once a relatively rare event but one that haunted the cybersecurity world with its insidious threat of turning any innocent application into a dangerous foothold in a victim’s network. Now one group of cybercriminals has turned that occasional nightmare into a near-weekly episode, corrupting hundreds of open source tools, extorting victims for profit, and sowing a new level of distrust in an entire ecosystem used to create the world’s software. On Tuesday night, open source code platform GitHub…

The AI-generated version of ‘Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico’ was on display at AIPAD’s The Photography show. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust released a statement this weekend condemning the unauthorized use of the photographer’s name and work for the creation of an “AI-generated color version” of Adams’ “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.” According to the trust, the piece was up for sale last month at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers’ (AIPAD) The Photography Show. The exhibit by Danziger Gallery “exploited Ansel’s name, reputation, and his most iconic image, while failing to…

Buying a new pair of glasses can be expensive, but if you have frames you love and they’re still in good condition, you might be able to save money by simply replacing the lenses. This is something you can easily do online. I would know, as I’ve replaced lenses in 15 pairs of glasses myself and can confirm that the online lens replacement process is more affordable, easier and faster than you’d think. Although it offers full-frame/lens packages, Lensabl puts its lens replacement service front and center and ranks highly in search results for “lens replacement.” Its motto is “Your…

AMOS relies on users executing malicious terminal commands themselvesSophos MDR identified ClickFix-style social engineering in macOS attacksHalf of macOS stealer reports involved AMOS, but Apple is fighting backAtomic macOS Stealer, also known as AMOS, is a persistent macOS security threat because it does not need sophisticated zero-day vulnerabilities to compromise Apple devices.Instead, this malware family repeatedly exploits ordinary user behaviour by tricking users into typing a single command into their own Terminal application.A recent incident investigated by Sophos MDR teams revealed exactly this pattern: a ClickFix-style ruse persuaded a victim to execute a malicious line of code manually.Latest Videos From…

Summer is here, and many of you are considering a travel router for your upcoming trip. While that’s a sensible thing to do, here’s an alternative: How about turning that inseparable laptop of yours into a mobile “router”? Among other things, that will help you pack a bit lighter. In this post, I’ll show you how to do exactly that, when possible: whenever that computer gets an Internet connection, such as when it connects to a Wi-Fi network at your destination, it can also provide a private Wi-Fi network for your other devices—your phones, tablets, or other laptops—just like when…

The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed. Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are encrypted on a sender’s device with keys that are available only to the receiver’s. By definition, E2EE means that no one else—including the platform itself—can read the plaintext messages. In sworn testimony before two US Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta does “not see any of the…