MongoDB now offers search and vector search in its Community Edition and Enterprise Server, allowing local AI app development with advanced retrieval features. Read...

monday.com launches new AI tools in Australia and New Zealand to enhance enterprise operations, including no-code monday agents and AI-powered CRM features. Read...

Philips launches two gaming projectors, GamePix 900 and 800 Smart, in Australia and New Zealand, priced from AUD $2,299, blending high performance with smart features. Read...

If you’ve ever wanted to call in sick and let an AI take over on your next Zoom meeting — well, that future isn’t quite here yet. But Zoom is adding “photorealistic avatars” to Zoom Workplace in addition to smoother video and live voice translation. That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to play hooky — although a version of you will appear on the screen, moving in time to your motions. This will make it appear as if you are present and engaged, even if you didn’t have time to make yourself presentable for the camera. Unfortunately, the simple Zoom app that connected people during the epidemic has evolved into a full-fledged workspace like Microsoft Teams. It now includes multiple levels of AI (say hello to Zoomie!) with agentic services, whiteboards, chat, and more. But the core experience, now known as Workplace, is also improving in measurable ways, the company said at its Zoomtopia developer conference. It didn’t provide examples of how each feature will work. However, company’s Workspace roadmap looks intriguing. For years, users have been able to turn their cameras off, which doesn’t necessarily indicate that the user is paying attention. Its solution is a “photorealistic avatar” that will “track and mimic their live video feed,” described as a “lifelike AI-generated avatar.” Since that feature is scheduled to roll out in December, we won’t know whether that avatar is simply an animated photo of you or something different. Zoom is also adding a feature that rivals are adding: real-time voice translations, which Microsoft has demonstrated (as announced for Microsoft Edge, and then later demonstrated) as has Google with real-time voice translations for Google Meet. The problem here has been the difficulty in doing so. Microsoft’s demos have only been in English, Spanish, and Korean, while Google Meet has been limited to just Spanish. Zoom isn’t saying how many languages it’ll deliver, though the feature is expected to roll out in December. How Zoom’s real-time voice translation will work.Zoom And yes, the basic Zoom Meetings app is getting an upgrade, too. One of the challenges in buying a top-notch webcam is that some of the basic 1080p webcams attached to a laptop don’t quite deliver the visual quality you’re used to seeing on YouTube. Zoom doesn’t support streaming in 1440p, let alone 4K, and it still won’t. However, you’ll now be able to share content in 4K, and Zoom is upgrading its infrastructure to allow 1080p cameras at 60Hz. Most webcams stream at just 30Hz, which can look a little jittery; 60Hz is the refresh rate of TV and most streaming services, so using a 60Hz webcam will subconsciously deliver a “TV-like” experience. This, too, is expected in December. Zoom is also using AI to help users find and book meetings. A new “Zoomie” group assistant can be used to check into a room, check on action items or updates, and more. Zoomie appears to be one part of the AI Companion, which helps track down free meeting times by examining participants’ schedules and digs up relevant documents so you’re prepared. These features will be available in the coming months, Zoom said. Zoom’s AI Companion on the Web.Zoom One of the features some IT managers worry about is Zoom’s ability to “sit in” on a meeting and record and take notes. Zoom is branching out: soon users will be able to bring the AI Companion to Microsoft Teams and Google Meet later this month, with support for WebEx at a later date. And, of course, there’s more traditional AI, too: this November, Zoom will add “writing assistance” that’s tuned to a user’s style, along with “deep research” that will be added the month before. All that will be enabled in a new work “surface” that Zoom will launch in November for the Web. Read...

If your laptop is like mine, it’s lacking a bunch of useful ports. Once you plug in the charger, you probably don’t have much connectivity left—especially if your charger plugs into USB-C. And what if you want to connect an external monitor or two but don’t have any HDMI ports? Yeah, it sucks that ports are disappearing on modern laptops. But no worries because you can solve this with a simple accessory like this Anker 7-in-1 USB-C hub that’s now just $17.99 (was $24.99) on Amazon with a smooth 28 percent discount. With this nifty gadget, you can expand your laptop’s potential by quite a bit. Acer’s USB-C hub features a USB-C port with 100W of power delivery, allowing you to keep charging your laptop even while this hub is plugged in. Then, while charging, this hub also provides a separate USB-C data port, two USB-A ports, both SD and microSD card slots, and an HDMI port that supports a monitor up to 4K at 30Hz. It’s the ultimate accessory for turning a laptop into a proper workstation. Grab this Acer USB-C hub for just $17.99 while you still can because this limited-time deal won’t last forever! This matches the lowest price it’s ever been, so now’s as good a time as ever. Save 28% on this awesome 7-port USB-C hub with 4K HDMIBuy now at Amazon Read...

Cases of “AI psychosis” are apparently on the rise, and multiple people have committed suicide after conversing with the ChatGPT large language model. That’s pretty horrible. Representatives of ChatGPT maker OpenAI are testifying before the US congress in response, and the company is announcing new methods of detecting users’ age. According to the CEO, that may include ID verification. New age detection systems are being implemented in ChatGPT, and where the automated system can’t verify (to itself, at least) that a user is an adult, it will default to the more locked-down “under 18” experience that blocks sexual content and, “potentially involving law enforcement to ensure safety.” In a separate blog post spotted by Ars Technica, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that in some countries the system may also ask for an ID to verify the user’s age. “We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff,” Altman wrote. ChatGPT’s official policy is that users under the age of 13 are not allowed, but OpenAI claims that it’s building an experience that’s appropriate for children aged 13 to 17. Altman also talked up the privacy angle, a serious concern in countries and states that are now requiring ID verification before adults can access pornography or other controversial content. “We are developing advanced security features to ensure your data is private, even from OpenAI employees,” Altman wrote. But exceptions will be made, apparently at the discretion of ChatGPT’s systems and OpenAI. “Potential serious misuse,” including threats to someone’s life or plans to harm others, or “a potential massive cybersecurity incident,” could be viewed and reviewed by human moderators. As ChatGPT and other large language model services become more ubiquitous, their use has become more scrutinized from just about every angle. “AI psychosis” appears to be a phenomenon where users communicate with an LLM like a person, and the generally obliging nature of LLM design indulges them into a repeating, digressing cycle of delusion and potential harm. Last month parents of a California 16-year-old who committed suicide filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI. The teen had conversed with ChatGPT, and logs of the conversations that have been confirmed as genuine include instructions for tying a noose and what appear to be encouragement and support for the decision to kill himself. It’s only the latest in a continuing series of mental health crises and suicides, which appear to be either directly inspired or aggravated by chatting with “artificial intelligence” products like ChatGPT and Character.AI. Both the parents in the case above and OpenAI representatives testified before the United States Senate earlier this week in an inquiry into chat systems, and the Federal Trade Commission is looking into OpenAI, Character.AI, Meta, Google, and xAI (now the official owner of X, formerly Twitter, under Elon Musk) for potential dangers of AI chatbots. As more than a trillion US dollars are invested into various AI industries, and countries strive to make sure they have a piece of that pie, questions keep emerging about the dangers of LLM systems. But with all that money flying around, a “move fast and break things” approach seems to have been the default position up to now. Safeguards are emerging, but balancing them with user privacy won’t be easy. “We realize that these principles are in conflict and not everyone will agree with how we are resolving that conflict,” wrote Altman. Read...

The latest update to Firefox brings the browser up to version 143 with various new features and improvements, including some that other browsers already offer. However, some of these features—like Google Lens—are only being introduced gradually. The update also fixes some security vulnerabilities as usual. Mozilla plans to release Firefox 144 on October 14th, 2025. What’s new in Firefox 143? The biggest addition with this update is that Microsoft Copilot has been added to the AI chatbots available in the sidebar, joining ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Le Chat Mistral. Firefox 143 also adds the ability to use Google Lens to search for information on images, but this feature requires Google to be set as the browser’s default search engine. It’s currently rolling out gradually to users. (Lens is already available in Chrome and Opera One, and Edge has a similar function that accesses Bing.) To manually enable reverse image searches with Google Lens, navigate to the internal configuration page by typing about:config into the address bar, then search for the browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate flag. If the value of the flag is set to “false,” double-click it and change it to “true.” The change should take effect immediately. On Windows, Firefox 143 can run websites as web apps that can be pinned directly to the Windows taskbar. There’s a new icon on the right-hand side of the address bar for pinning. However, this doesn’t work with Firefox installed from the Microsoft Store. Linux and macOS versions of Firefox will get a similar feature later on. Other improvements include: the ability to pin tabs by dragging a tab to the designated area at the top of the tab bar; a camera preview when websites request access to the camera; and important dates and events displayed in the address bar (such as Mother’s Day or Easter). For accessibility applications—like Windows Voice Access, Text Cursor Indicator, and Narrator—Firefox offers the option of using Microsoft UI Automation, allowing such tools to use this interface to interact with the user interfaces of apps. Mozilla also plans to gradually roll out this functionality in the coming weeks. Security updates in Firefox 143 Mozilla’s Security Advisory 2025-73 for Firefox 143 lists at least 11 eliminated security vulnerabilities. Mozilla categorizes two of the externally reported vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-10527 and CVE-2025-10528) as high risk. These vulnerabilities in the Canvas2D graphics component allow malicious code to break out of the browser sandbox. The remaining vulnerabilities are considered medium or low risk, with one exception: the last entry concerns an unspecified number of internally discovered memory safety bugs, summarized under identifier CVE-2025-10537. These are also considered high risk. Read...

High-end gaming laptops have been getting more affordable, and we can’t help but rejoice at that. Just look at this Lenovo Legion 5i gaming laptop, which just had its price slashed down to $1,300 at B&H. That’s a massive $400 discount on an impressive machine. This Lenovo Legion 5i is an absolute beast of a device that doesn’t play around when it comes to handling your workload or powering your gaming sessions. With an Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX processor and a massive 32GB of speedy DDR5 RAM, this laptop is ready for any and all scenarios. Topped off with a 1TB SSD, it’s a fantastic combo with plenty of storage space for all your apps, games, and files. But the kicker here is the lovely Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, part of Nvidia’s latest line of GPUs and equipped to run the latest Nvidia features like DLSS 4. It’ll last you for years to come, and you’ll be able to enjoy your games at high frame rates on this laptop’s gorgeous 15.1-inch OLED screen with crisp 2560×1600 resolution and 165Hz of refresh. Connectivity is also next-level here, featuring a Thunderbolt 4 port with power delivery, an HDMI 2.1 port, a fast USB-C and three fast USB-A for data and peripherals, plus Ethernet and 3.5mm audio. It also supports the latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless. This is a monster machine for enthusiast gamers, and now’s a great time to get one with it being on sale for $1,300 at B&H. Not exactly the laptop you want? No worries! Be sure to check out our recommendations for the best overall gaming laptops and best budget gaming laptops. Save $400 on this RTX 5060 laptop with OLED display and crazy specs Buy now from B&H Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Provides up to four full-speed PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 slots Fantastically affordable Auxiliary power connector and fan control header Very good performance Cons Motherboard PCIe bifurcation capabilities determine how many of the four slots will function No hardware RAID Our Verdict Carefully check your motherboard’s PCIe capabilities and BIOS bifurcation settings for its x16 slot before buying the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5. Those determine how many of the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5’s four x4 M.2 ports you’ll be able to use. Given the price, even one slot will make it worthwhile. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 NVMe adapter card Retailer Price $89.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices When I first heard about the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5, I had visions of the 4-slot NVMe 5.0 adapter card as an uber-affordable four-SSD RAID 0 array cranking out 50GBps of sustained throughput. Dream on, buddy. Asus’ product page doesn’t really highlight that this card relies on your system’s ability to divvy up (bifurcate) lanes in the x16 slot that the card occupies: four lanes per SSD slot. Not a lot of systems can manage more than two. Our Intel test bed only allowed three, and performance maxxed out at 25GBps. To be fair to Asus, this is true for nearly all low-cost PCIe RAID cards. They just apparently assume that you’ll know this. I should have given the low cost. Regardless, the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is priced so low it’s a boon, even if you can use only one, two, or three of the slots. Especially on some Intel motherboards where adapter card PCIe 5.0 M.2 NVMe slots tend to perform better than those on the motherboard. What are the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5’s features? I’ve already described most of the card’s features, but to add a bit more detail… The card is a full-length, 11.5-inch, x16, PCIe 5.0 adapter featuring four M.2 NVMe slots. There are also plenty of thermal strips (top and bottom), a fan, plus a beefy heatsink (see the lead photo) that covers most of what you see in the image below. As you can see, there are not a lot of logic chips on the card. It’s just smart enough to present the SSDs as the motherboard allows. To make sure the card can handle any NVMe SSD or combination thereof, there’s a six-pin power connector. Nice touch, though even with four fast PCIe 5.0 SSDs on board, I didn’t need it. If for some reason you do, hopefully your power supply has a spare. Finally, there’s also a fan control header that you can attach to the motherboard so that the Asus Fan Xper4 software can define the operational parameters for the cooling fan. The endplate features a fan on/off switch (maybe you like quiet?) and status LEDs so you can tell if the slots are filled and power is supplied. However, they won’t tell you whether the SSD is actually available to the system or not. For that, check the BIOS or Windows Disk Management. Caveats My biggest issue with the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is that the website product page doesn’t prominently call out the need for the proper motherboard bifurcation. Or that the RAID is only achieved via software, for that matter. Again, to be fair to Asus, these caveats apply to nearly every low-cost PCIe NVMe RAID card I’ve seen, the Konyead PCIe 3.0 four-slot card, which I have not tested, excepted. Most however, saliently call out the need for bifurcation. See anything here about system PCIe bifurcation required? Neither do we. There is a small blurb about bifurcation under the “Support RAID” section (see below) when you scroll down, but it still doesn’t make the ramifications obvious and further muddies the waters by talking about the NVMe RAID function. There is no dedicated NVMe RAID function, just Windows RAID, Intel’s RST RAID, or software (I used OWC SoftRAID). This doesn’t tell you a lot about the bifurcation requirements and might lead you to believe the card has NVMe RAID functionality. It doesn’t. As already stated, the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 relies completely upon your motherboard to divvy up the 16 lanes of PCIe in your x16 slot to supply each slot with the four lanes it requires. Upon query, AMD told me that bifurcation capabilities start with the CPU, but can also involve the chipset and BIOS. Intel had not answered my query at the time of this writing, but I suspect the same answer. Our Asus ProArt Creator Z890 test bed does not support 4x4x4x4, only 8×8 (two slots) and 8x4x4 (three slots). I could not use all four. However, an Asus ProArt AMD X870E motherboard apparently does support 4x4x4x4. This bifurcation chart from Asus covers all its motherboards, chipsets, and major CPUs. It also shows that apparently there’s a very good reason you might want to opt for AMD when it comes to cheap NVMe RAID storage. None of Intel’s mainstream CPUs/chipsets support 4x4x4x4 (also notated X4+X4+X4+X4), though some of their workstation products do. Another consideration is how many PCIe lanes your CPU supports. But more PCIe lanes, say 48 as opposed to 24 doesn’t mean a 4x4x4x4 bifurcation setting; it just means that you might be able to run a x16 GPU as well as an x16 RAID card. How much does the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 cost? The Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 card costs only $80 — merely $15 more than I paid for the older single-slot Asus Hyper M.2 card. Even if you can only use one or two slots, that’s not a bad deal at all. And… If you ever get a motherboard that supports 4x4x4x4, you’re good to go. Of course, if you want four guaranteed-functional PCIe 5.0 NVMe slots for your x16 slot, you can always opt for Highpoint’s excellent self-bifurcating 7604A card — for $1000. Gulp. Alas, we’ve had some odd issues with that card. Even if you can only use one or two slots on the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5, it’s still a good deal at the $80 price. How does the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 perform? Obviously, I was hoping for a four-SSD RAID 0 array, but three had to do: a WD SN8100, Crucial 700 Premium, and a Lexar 790 Pro. All fast, all PCIe 5.0. SSDs mounted in the card performed a bit faster individually than those same SSDs in our Z890 motherboard’s onboard PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. This is not unheard of in the industry. The difference isn’t earth-shattering, but it is noticeable — 1GBps faster for the WD SN8100 results shown below. This is the WD SN8100 tested singly on the Asus card. It’s around 1GBps faster on the card than in the motherboard’s PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. I first created the three-drive array using Windows own Disk Management (RAID 0, or Striped in Windows world). This is the most readily available and cheapest for most users as it’s built into Windows. Windows RAID turned in a balanced, if unspectacular combination of read and write performance — faster than a single drive, but not by a ton. OWC’s SoftRAID was faster reading, but slower writing, and Intel’s RST was faster writing, but slower reading. This is a nice, but not earth-shattering gain in performance. If you decide on Windows RAID, make sure you select quick format. It’s not selected by default and the long format process takes seemingly, and beats on your SSDs as if they were HDDs, chewing up write cycles as it goes. OWC’s SoftRAID delivered 24GBps reading and 13GBps writing. Not nearly the write performance I was hoping for. OWC’s SoftRAiD was fast reading, and slow writing, though I did see some better write performances (15GBps) than the one shown. Using Intel’s (RST) Rapid Storage Technology, I got better write numbers and worse read numbers than with either Windows RAID or OWC’s SoftRAID. Go figure. It’s still not my fantasy 50GBps (or 40Gbps given only three SSDs). Three SSDs on the x16 Gen5 using Intel RST. In reality, your mileage will vary according to which SSDs you use, how many you combine in RAID, and the software you use. But it will be faster than a single SSD if you stripe them. Note that RAID 0 offers zero fault tolerance — if one SSD dies, the data does as well without expensive recovery. While there is this risk with SSDs, it’s not nearly the danger that it is with mechanical HDDs. We haven’t really seen an SSD flat-out fail in a number of years. On the upside, along with RAID 0’s increased performance, you get a larger volume size (the size of the smallest-capacity disk in the array times the number of disks). The one in our testing was 6TB (2TB times three). In the end, the performance wasn’t what I’d hoped for, which is not so much a jab at Asus, but the software and drivers involved. Not shocking, but disappointing. I was most perturbed by Intel RST’s slower read performance, which I thought would be significantly faster. As to RST… Before you decide on Intel RAID, beware that retreating from it once deployed can be a struggle. Somewhat surprisingly, RST RAID 0 enabled and configured solely in the BIOS was just as fast without the Windows drivers installed. I say stick with that arrangement as uninstalling the RST drivers from Windows rendered the OS on our testbed unbootable. Additionally, either the BIOS RST, RST driver, or a combination of both seemingly corrupted the GPT on one of the SSDs. This created a BIOS error about said issue that I couldn’t get past (after disabling RST) without removing it from the Asus card and repairing it in an external enclosure. Fun, fun, fun. Do yourself a favor, and image your OS drive before trying Intel RST. Caveat: With our Z890 motherboard’s 8x4x4 bifurcation setting, both the 3rd and 4th slots on the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 card had to be filled, or the third drive would not show up. Should you buy the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5? If you’ve read this article thoroughly, and understand the requirements and limitations — sure. As much as I wish I could use all four slots, it was still a boon having three more fast PCIe 5.0 SSDs in addition to our motherboard’s solitary PCIe 5.0 type. If the testbed didn’t already employ the super-fast (and extremely pricey) Highpoint 7604A, I’d certainly use the Asus card in testing. Read...

LogicMonitor upgrades its LM Envision platform with AI-driven features, expanded cloud support including Oracle Cloud, and a new flexible pricing model. Read...