“The future of podcasting shouldn’t be locked behind walled gardens,” writes the team at Pocket Casts. To push that point forward, Pocket Casts, owned by the company behind WordPress, Automattic Inc., has made its web player free to everyone. Previously available only to logged-in Pocket Casts users paying $4 per month, Pocket Casts now offers nearly any public-facing podcast feed for streaming, along with controls like playback speed and playlist…

The AI industry is doing its best to will “agents”—pieces of AI-driven software that can perform multistep actions on your behalf—into reality. Several tech companies, including Google, have emphasized agentic features recently, and in January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote that 2025 would be the year AI agents “join the workforce.” OpenAI is working to make that promise into a reality. On Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled a new “Responses API” designed…

Apple on Tuesday patched a critical zero-day vulnerability in virtually all iPhones and iPad models it supports and said it may have been exploited in “an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals” using older versions of iOS. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-24201, resides in Webkit, the browser engine driving Safari and all other browsers developed for iPhones and iPads. Devices affected include the iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro…

Google has a new mission in the AI era: to add Gemini to as many of the company’s products as possible. We’ve already seen Gemini appear in search results, text messages, and more. In Google’s latest update to Workspace, Gemini will be able to add calendar appointments from Gmail with a single click. Well, assuming Gemini gets it right the first time, which is far from certain. The new calendar…

HP, along with other printer brands, is infamous for issuing firmware updates that brick already-purchased printers that have tried to use third-party ink. In a new form of frustration, HP is now being accused of issuing a firmware update that broke customers’ laser printers—even though the devices are loaded with HP-brand toner. The firmware update in question is version 20250209, which HP issued on March 4 for its LaserJet MFP…

The AI industry has a new buzzword: “PhD-level AI.” According to a report from The Information, OpenAI may be planning to launch several specialized AI “agent” products including a $20,000 monthly tier focused on supporting “PhD-level research.” Other reportedly planned agents include a “high-income knowledge worker” assistant at $2,000 monthly and a software developer agent at $10,000 monthly. OpenAI has not yet confirmed these prices, but they have mentioned PhD-level…

Nearly 1 million Windows devices were targeted in recent months by a sophisticated “malvertising” campaign that surreptitiously stole login credentials, cryptocurrency, and other sensitive information from infected machines, Microsoft said. The campaign began in December, when the attackers, who remain unknown, seeded websites with links that downloaded ads from malicious servers. The links led targeted machines through several intermediary sites until finally arriving at repositories on Microsoft-owned GitHub, which hosted…

A pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently discovered hints that the process of compressing information can solve complex reasoning tasks without pre-training on a large number of examples. Their system tackles some types of abstract pattern-matching tasks using only the puzzles themselves, challenging conventional wisdom about how machine learning systems acquire problem-solving abilities. “Can lossless information compression by itself produce intelligent behavior?” ask Isaac Liao, a first-year PhD student,…

A newly discovered network botnet comprising an estimated 30,000 webcams and video recorders—with the largest concentration in the US—has been delivering what is likely to be the biggest denial-of-service attack ever seen, a security researcher inside Nokia said. The botnet, tracked under the name Eleven11bot, first came to light in late February when researchers inside Nokia’s Deepfield Emergency Response Team observed large numbers of geographically dispersed IP addresses delivering “hyper-volumetric attacks.”…

For many people, coding is about telling a computer what to do and having the computer perform those precise actions repeatedly. With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, it’s now possible for someone to describe a program in English and have the AI model translate it into working code without ever understanding how the code works. Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy recently gave this practice a name—”vibe coding”—and it’s…