A lot of people are overly reliant on Google. They put all of their important messages, appointments, musings, contacts, and spreadsheets into Google products. Many are aware that Google, like many tech firms, is likely to prioritize its own interests over user privacy. But signing data away for technological conveniences is a common occurrence. Murena’s Pixel Tablet takes a stance against that norm. It’s Google’s Pixel Tablet hardware running an…

Cisco said that one of its representatives fell victim to a voice phishing attack that allowed threat actors to download profile information belonging to users of a third-party customer relationship management system. “Our investigation has determined that the exported data primarily consisted of basic account profile information of individuals who registered for a user account on Cisco.com,” the company disclosed. Information included names, organization names, addresses, Cisco assigned user IDs,…

AI search engine Perplexity is using stealth bots and other tactics to evade websites’ no-crawl directives, an allegation that if true violates Internet norms that have been in place for more than three decades, network security and optimization service Cloudflare said Monday. In a blog post, Cloudflare researchers said the company received complaints from customers who had disallowed Perplexity scraping bots by implementing settings in their sites’ robots.txt files and…

We all know how to find our favorite shows and blockbuster films on mainstream streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+. But even as streaming has opened the door to millions of hours of on-demand entertainment, it can still feel like there’s nothing fresh or exciting to watch anymore. If you agree, it’s time to check out some of the more niche streaming services available, where you can find…

Silicon Valley’s AI talent war just reached a compensation milestone that makes even the most legendary scientific achievements of the past look financially modest. When Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year)—with potentially $100 million in the first year alone—it shattered every historical precedent for scientific and technical compensation we can find on record. That includes salaries during…

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has placed unbelievable pressure on drone developers on both sides of the war, who have responded with astounding innovations that include: fiber-optic drones (to prevent radio jamming) kamikaze sea drones, eventually equipped with anti-air missiles drones that fire shotguns bomber drones that drop mines and grenades drones that release flaming thermite into trenches long-range, aircraft-style drones that can substitute for small cruise missiles interceptor drones that…

Since 2023, Amazon has been framing Alexa+ as a monumental evolution of Amazon’s voice assistant that will make it more conversational, capable, and, for Amazon, lucrative. Amazon said in a press release on Thursday that it has given early access of the generative AI voice assistant to “millions” of people. The product isn’t publicly available yet, and some advertised features are still unavailable, but Amazon’s CEO is already considering loading…

AI tools are widely used by software developers, but those devs and their managers are still grappling with figuring out how exactly to best put the tools to use, with growing pains emerging along the way. That’s the takeaway from the latest survey of 49,000 professional developers by community and information hub StackOverflow, which itself has been heavily impacted by the addition of large language models (LLMs) to developer workflows….

Russian-state hackers are targeting foreign embassies in Moscow with custom malware that gets installed using adversary-in-the-middle attacks that operate at the ISP level, Microsoft warned Thursday. The campaign has been ongoing since last year. It leverages ISPs in that country, which are obligated to work on behalf of the Russian government. With the ability to control the ISP network, the threat group—which Microsoft tracks under the name Secret Blizzard—positions itself…

Google has lost its appeal in the long-running app store antitrust case, which marks another major victory for Epic Games. Google lost the original case in 2023 when a jury found it abused its market position in smartphones to block competition from Epic and others. Google was able to get the penalties suspended while it pursued its appeal, but now it may need to make plans for a more open…