OpenAI signs massive AI compute deal with Amazon

On Monday, OpenAI announced it has signed a seven-year, $38 billion deal to buy cloud services from Amazon Web Services to power products like ChatGPT and Sora. It’s the company’s first big computing deal after a fundamental restructuring last week that gave OpenAI more operational and financial freedom from Microsoft. The agreement gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processors to train and run its AI models….

November 3, 2025
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Two Windows vulnerabilities, one a 0-day, are under active exploitation

Two Windows vulnerabilities—one a zero-day that has been known to attackers since 2017 and the other a critical flaw that Microsoft initially tried and failed to patch recently—are under active exploitation in widespread attacks targeting a swath of the Internet, researchers say. The zero-day went undiscovered until March, when security firm Trend Micro said it had been under active exploitation since 2017, by as many as 11 separate advanced persistent threats…

October 31, 2025
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Closing Windows 11’s Task Manager accidentally opens up more copies of Task Manager

One reason to use the Task Manager in Windows is to see if any of the apps running on your computer are misbehaving or using a disproportionate amount of resources. But what do you do when the misbehaving app is the Task Manager itself? After a recent Windows update, some users (including Windows Latest) noticed that closing the Task Manager window was actually failing to close the app, leaving the…

October 31, 2025
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“Unexpectedly, a deer briefly entered the family room”: Living with Gemini Home

You just can’t ignore the effects of the generative AI boom. Even if you don’t go looking for AI bots, they’re being integrated into virtually every product and service. And for what? There’s a lot of hand-wavey chatter about agentic this and AGI that, but what can “gen AI” do for you right now? Gemini for Home is Google’s latest attempt to make this technology useful, integrating Gemini with the…

October 31, 2025
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With new acquisition, OpenAI signals plans to integrate deeper into the OS

OpenAI has acquired Software Applications Incorporated (SAI), perhaps best known for the core team that produced what became Shortcuts on Apple platforms. More recently, the team has been working on Sky, a context-aware AI interface layer on top of macOS. The financial terms of the acquisition have not been publicly disclosed. “AI progress isn’t only about advancing intelligence—it’s about unlocking it through interfaces that understand context, adapt to your intent,…

October 23, 2025
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Microsoft makes Copilot “human-centered” with a ‘90s-style animated assistant

Microsoft said earlier this month that it wanted to add better voice controls to Copilot, Windows 11’s built-in chatbot-slash-virtual assistant. As described, this new version of Copilot sounds an awful lot like another stab at Cortana, the voice assistant that Microsoft tried (and failed) to get people to use in Windows 10 in the mid-to-late 2010s. Turns out that the company isn’t done trying to reformulate and revive ideas it…

October 23, 2025
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Cache poisoning vulnerabilities found in 2 DNS resolving apps

The makers of BIND, the Internet’s most widely used software for resolving domain names, are warning of two vulnerabilities that allow attackers to poison entire caches of results and send users to malicious destinations that are indistinguishable from the real ones. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-40778 and CVE-2025-40780, stem from a logic error and a weakness in generating pseudo-random numbers, respectively. They each carry a severity rating of 8.6. Separately,…

October 22, 2025
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Samsung Galaxy XR is the first Android XR headset, now on sale for $1,800

The era of Android virtual reality is here… again. Google’s first two attempts at making Android fit for your face didn’t work out, but the AI era and a partnership with Samsung have enabled a third attempt, and maybe the third time’s the charm. Samsung has unveiled the Galaxy XR headset, the first and currently only device running Google’s new Android XR platform. It’s available for pre-order today, but it…

October 22, 2025
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AWS outage reminds us why $2,449 Internet-dependent beds are a bad idea

This week’s Amazon Web Services outage had some people waking up on the wrong side of the bed. A Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem affected AWS cloud hosting, resulting in an outage that impacted more than 1,000 web-based products and services and millions of people. Perhaps one of the most avoidable breakdowns came via people’s beds. The reliance on the Internet for smart bed products from Eight Sleep resulted in…

October 22, 2025
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Upcoming iOS and macOS 26.1 update will let you fog up your Liquid Glass

October 21, 2025

Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface design was one of the most noticeable and divisive features of its major software updates this year. It added additional fluidity and translucency throughout iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Apple’s other operating systems, and as we noted in our reviews, the default settings weren’t always great for readability. The upcoming 26.1 update for all of those OSes is taking a step toward addressing some of…

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