Microsoft event debuts new AI-friendly hardware and Windows changes

In its first live event in two years, Microsoft today announced its newest Surface laptop, outlined a host of changes coming to Windows 11, and shared a vision of how local-AI and agentic workflows could reshape personal computing for those in the dev community as well as home enthusiasts. Surface Laptop Ultra Originally teased in May 2026, the new Surface Laptop Ultra will be Microsoft’s first offering to take advantage…

October 8, 2026
Read More >>

Drones sink ships near NATO countries in “unacceptable” attacks, EU says

Drones sank two cargo ships and damaged a third in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries for the first time, killing at least two sailors. The attacks represent a notable escalation as Black Sea commercial shipping has increasingly come under attack during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Russia also being accused of carrying out “hybrid warfare” incidents across Europe. The Togo-flagged cargo ship Alfa Watan sank, and…

October 6, 2026
Read More >>

HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery+ “will unify into a single service”

After months of industry and customer speculation, Paramount Skydance has shed some light on the future of the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services. Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today, ending a monthslong saga that began when Netflix last year announced its own plans to buy WBD. Netflix scrapped those plans in February. Skydance is the name of the company created from the $111 billion…

October 6, 2026
Read More >>

Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services

Attackers hijacked three top-level domains and used their control to mint counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large organizations, Google said Tuesday. The attackers launched a series of attacks on the .gh, .sl, and .as country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and then modified authoritative DNS records for selected domains within those namespaces. By controlling those DNS records, the attackers were able to pass automated domain control validation checks and…

October 6, 2026
Read More >>

OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic

The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions. The objective of some of the OpenAI agents’ actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one…

October 6, 2026
Read More >>

MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you’ve never heard of

The adoption of AI agents in millions of organizations is creating new opportunities for attackers to make them take malicious actions, such as exfiltrating database contents and sensitive business and personal information. In the past five months, Google and four other organizations—with little in common except for their use of AI agents—have acknowledged vulnerabilities that exploit one agent inside a targeted network to spread harmful instructions to other internal agents….

October 5, 2026
Read More >>

Russian drones strike Ukraine’s data centers by exploiting air defense gaps

A surge in Russian jet-powered drone strikes on Ukrainian data centers has increasingly disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of people. Now Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other government officials are warning of the need for more air defense capabilities, as such telecommunication outages could threaten Ukraine’s digital economy and undermine the country’s ongoing resistance to Russia’s invasion. The Russian attacks on Ukrainian telecommunication infrastructure have focused on…

October 5, 2026
Read More >>

Explaining Hall-effect, TMR, and other new types of “mechanical” switches

The mechanical keyboard isn’t always so mechanical anymore. Over the past six years, keyboards with optical, Hall-effect, and other “contactless” switches have become increasingly common, often going for higher prices than traditional mechanical keyboards, which already command a premium over basic membrane boards. In return, they promise some theoretical advantages, particularly for gamers. In daily use, though, the differences can be pretty subtle. So what exactly are you paying for?…

October 5, 2026
Read More >>

The dawn of the age of the exoskeleton

This year, members of Seattle Mountain Rescue have been setting off into the wilds of the US Pacific Northwest wearing an unusual piece of kit. They’ve been hiking into the wilderness with powered assistive devices attached to their hips and legs. Designed to increase lower-body strength when climbing or carrying heavy loads, these pieces of equipment are being tested to see if they can boost rescuers’ speed and endurance when…

October 3, 2026
Read More >>

Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents

Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories. Friday’s announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they…

October 2, 2026
Read More >>