Windows 8 is remembered most for its oddball touchscreen-focused full-screen Start menu, but it also introduced a number of under-the-hood enhancements to Windows. One of those was UEFI Secure Boot, a mechanism for verifying PC bootloaders to ensure that unverified software can’t be loaded at startup. Secure Boot was enabled but technically optional for Windows 8 and Windows 10, but it became a formal system requirement for installing Windows starting…

Do you feel popular? There are people on the Internet who want to know all about you! Unfortunately, they don’t have the best of intentions, but Google has some handy tools to address that, and they’ve gotten an upgrade today. The “Results About You” tool can now detect and remove more of your personal information. Plus, the tool for removing non-consensual explicit imagery (NCEI) is faster to use. All you…

Apple’s 2026 has already brought us the AirTag 2 and a new Creator Studio app subscription aimed at independent content creators, but nothing so far for the company’s main product families. That could change soon, according to reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. New versions of Apple’s low-end iPhone, the basic iPad and iPad Air, and the higher-end MacBook Pros are said to be coming “imminently,” “soon,” and “shortly,” respectively, ahead…

Amid a push toward AI agents, with both Anthropic and OpenAI shipping multi-agent tools this week, Anthropic is more than ready to show off some of its more daring AI coding experiments. But as usual with claims of AI-related achievement, you’ll find some key caveats ahead. On Thursday, Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini published a blog post describing how he set 16 instances of the company’s Claude Opus 4.6 AI model…

Open source packages published on the npm and PyPI repositories were laced with code that stole wallet credentials from dYdX developers and backend systems and, in some cases, backdoored devices, researchers said. “Every application using the compromised npm versions is at risk ….” the researchers, from security firm Socket, said Friday. “Direct impact includes complete wallet compromise and irreversible cryptocurrency theft. The attack scope includes all applications depending on the…

On Thursday, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped products built around the same idea: instead of chatting with a single AI assistant, users should be managing teams of AI agents that divide up work and run in parallel. The simultaneous releases are part of a gradual shift across the industry, from AI as a conversation partner to AI as a delegated workforce, and they arrive during a week when that very concept…

There is very little functional difference between iOS and Android these days. The systems could integrate quite well if it weren’t for the way companies prioritize lock-in over compatibility. At least in the realm of file sharing, Google is working to fix that. After adding basic AirDrop support to Pixel 10 devices last year, the company says we can look forward to seeing it on many more phones this year….

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic’s campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot. Altman called…

When Valve announced its Steam Machine desktop PC and Steam Frame VR headset in mid-November of last year, it declined to announce pricing or availability information for either device. That was partly because RAM and storage prices had already begun to climb due to shortages caused by the AI industry’s insatiable need for memory. Those price spikes have only gotten worse since then, and they’re beginning to trickle down to…

Russian-state hackers wasted no time exploiting a critical Microsoft Office vulnerability that allowed them to compromise the devices inside diplomatic, maritime, and transport organizations in more than half a dozen countries, researchers said Wednesday. The threat group, tracked under names including APT28, Fancy Bear, Sednit, Forest Blizzard, and Sofacy, pounced on the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21509, less than 48 hours after Microsoft released an urgent, unscheduled security update late last…