Researchers say they recently found Google ads delivering a sophisticated tech support scam that freezes the screens of both Windows and Mac devices and displays messages urgently instructing them to phone a bogus call center. The ads were displayed all over the web, including on high-traffic maps, weather, real-estate, document-hosting, and sports sites. Users who called the number were then urged to pay hefty fees, grant remote access to their…

Since 2024, Microsoft has tried to sell “Copilot+ PC.” The marketing initiative was aimed at making it easy for people to know which Windows systems were approved to run AI-accelerated workloads locally. But Copilot+ PC branding is nowhere to be found on the new Surface PCs Microsoft announced this week. Speaking with Windows Central, Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, said that the new Surface computers “are not called Copilot+…

Virtually every Android device comes with the Play Store preloaded, but there are other ways to get apps. F-Droid bills itself as a community-driven source for free and open source Android apps, but its official app store has gone 10 years without a major update. That’s finally changing: After a multiyear effort, the team has just announced F-Droid 2.0 is rolling out. The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch…

Ukraine’s military robots are dropping from heavy drones in airborne assaults behind Russian lines as other robots clear mines ahead of advancing Ukrainian infantry. The wheeled ground robots are supporting Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi counterattack that has crushed a Russian military pincer movement and liberated dozens of square miles of occupied Ukrainian territory so far. The Ukrainian Third Army Corps revealed a “world-first” airborne assault involving robots and drones that took…

The world has known for decades that the RSA cryptosystem’s days are numbered. Once quantum computing becomes practical (estimates for that range from 3 to 20 or more years), the foundational security it provides will crumble. New research has revealed a novel method that uses classical computing to reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold. The practical risk is limited, but still significant. Applying the attack…

Disney+ got its fourth price hike in four years today. Hulu prices also went up. Disney+ and Hulu’s respective standalone, ad-free plans (which also support 4K and HDR) are each increasing 13 percent from $19 per month to $21.50/month. Disney+ and Hulu’s respective standalone plans with ads increased from $12 to $12.50. Read full article Comments Powered by WPeMatico

Wildfire detection from space and firefighting drones featured among the finalists honored in the $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire competition. Although no team walked away with either of the two grand prizes, such technologies could prove helpful as the world grapples with the growing costs of worsening wildfire disasters. The competition’s First Prize track for space-based wildfire detection challenged teams to accurately detect all fires across a large swath of Australia…

Microsoft said Tuesday that it led an industry-wide disruption of a subscription-based scam platform that used an AI chatbot to compromise 12,000 Microsoft accounts over a few-month span. Named EvilTokens, the platform was introduced over a Telegram channel in February and charged an initial $1,500 fee and a recurring $500 charge each month after that. EvilTokens provided a single service for streamlining most steps required to compromise email accounts in…

Video editing has never been Android’s strong suit. While Apple has long offered iMovie for iPhone and iPad, Google has never had a comparable offering. Adobe is now stepping up to fill this feature gap with a proper version of Premiere. The app is now available in the Play Store for almost all Android devices, and it’s free (mostly). Android’s version of Premiere doesn’t offer all the features you’d get…

A “human error” in the IT department led to Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) losing data from maternity records over an 11-year span. The data loss occurred on August 18, the English hospitals announced in a blog post on Monday spotted by The Register. The blog said the problem is “the result of human error” during routine technical work while “creating a copy of a radiotherapy database for reporting…