Vectra AI has appointed Chua Hock Leng as Vice President and General Manager for APJ, driving growth and advanced threat detection in the region`s cybersecurity market. Read...

Last week, I secured my lowest price for Spectrum internet in years. All it took was a call to Spectrum’s retention department, which is where you end up after telling the automated system you want to cancel your service. After a mildly tedious conversation with an exceedingly friendly rep, my monthly bill dropped from $68 to $45 per month for the next full year. Not only did I save money, but my speeds increased from 400 Mbps to 500 Mbps. While I can’t guarantee the same results everywhere, in general it’s a great time to threaten to cancel cable internet service. For years, Comcast and Charter (which operates the Spectrum brand) have boasted to shareholders that growth in home internet more than offsets the collapse of cable TV, but now they’re losing internet customers to vendors offering faster fiber and cheaper 5G wireless alternatives. They are highly motivated to keep potential defectors on board, so you should take full advantage of their collective insecurity. What competition looks like Last year, Spectrum and Comcast lost 508,000 and 411,000 home internet customers respectively . The year before, Comcast lost 66,000, while Spectrum lost 61,000. Stock prices for both companies are already below what they were two years ago. By contrast, fiber and wireless home internet are growing. T-Mobile and Verizon added 1.7 million and 1.5 million wireless home internet customers in 2024 respectively, while AT&T added 1 million customers to its fiber service. Both of their stocks are up from two years ago. This isn’t rocket science: Wireless home internet is cheaper than cable, with plans starting at $35 per month for T-Mobile and Verizon when bundled with mobile phone service. Fiber, meanwhile, offers symmetric upload and download speeds, which aren’t always available with cable, and it can be cheaper as well. (AT&T’s 500 Mbps plan, for instance, costs $75 per month on a non-promotional basis, $10 per month less than Comcast.) Cable providers should have reckoned with this new reality years ago. Instead, they resorted to scare tactics and misinformation. Comcast and Charter both rolled out ad campaigns to convince people that they didn’t actually want cheaper internet service, which they later had to modify for being misleading. Comcast then tried to advertise its internet plans as “10G” in a desperate attempt to look better than 5G (despite being unrelated technologically). Advertising watchdogs pressured Comcast to drop that line of attack as well. Cable’s response Only now are the cable giants doing what they should have done all along, which is to actually compete. Comcast, for instance, announced a somewhat-simplified set of home internet plans last week, starting at $40 per month for 300 Mbps service with a one-year price guarantee. (Customers can also pay a higher price of $55 per month to lock in that rate for five years.) These new plans also reverse a longstanding policy of enforcing data caps in most markets. Comcast’s internet service plans as of July 2025.Comcast Last year, Comcast also launched a separate pair of internet plans under its “Now” brand, priced at $30 per month for 100 Mbps and $45 per month for 200 Mbps. Those plans don’t include data caps either. Spectrum’s response hasn’t been as splashy. It’s been more focused on increasing internet speeds and bundling more services together, including free streaming services on its cable TV side, and an offer of $30-per-month home internet (at 500 Mbps) when bundled with two mobile lines. It’s also been scrapping hidden fees and trying to improve its customer service. But here’s the problem: Cable companies don’t want to hand out big discounts to existing customers if they can avoid it. While Comcast says its new packages are available to anyone, existing customers must call in to make the switch, and I’ve heard from a few readers who’ve run into problems getting the plans they want. As my experience with Spectrum has shown, it’s all a matter of reaching the right representative. What you should do about it Negotiating a lower home internet price is easy. You just need to bypass the standard customer service department and skip straight to the one with the goal of keeping you from cancelling your service. You can often accomplish this through the automated answering system by selecting the options that lead to cancelling your service. I understand this can be nerve-wracking. If you have no intention of switching providers, you certainly wouldn’t want the cable company to call your bluff and cut you off without warning. Trust me, that’s not going to happen. Cable companies operate retention departments for the express purpose of pumping the breaks on cancellations and talking things out first. They also have access to promotions that standard customer service reps don’t. (Every Spectrum retention specialist I’ve ever talked to has relished pointing this out.) If it makes you more comfortable, just approach the subject in a circumspect way. Once the retention rep is on the line, tell them you’re thinking about cancelling, or you want to discuss the logistics of cancelling at a convenient future date. In my experience that’s enough to set the promotional gears in motion. And if that doesn’t work, maybe it’s time to look into other options. There are more of them available now in more places, much to the cable companies’ dismay. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more money-saving advice. Read...

Scams often use fear to trick people—and of such schemes, scareware is extremely obvious about this tactic. On a malicious website, pop-up windows wrest control of your screen, blaring alarms that your PC has been compromised or you’re being spied upon. But if you call the number or download the “antivirus” software in the alert, you actually make yourself vulnerable. Last fall, Microsoft announced it would begin blocking scareware within its Edge browser, but the first priority was organizations. The feature later became available as a preview to Microsoft Edge insiders (aka the beta testers). Now, just after summer’s start, Microsoft is advertising the preview within the general version of Edge—but there’s one small catch. It’s not on for everyone by default. PCWorld On my PC, I had to enable it myself by following these steps: Go to Settings Choose Privacy, search, and services in the left-hand navigation bar Select Security In the middle of the page, click the toggle for Scareware blocker (preview) to turn the feature on PCWorld As badly needed as this kind of protection is, blocking scareware in your browser is just one part of the equation. In case something slips by, you’ll still want legitimate antivirus software to detect and nuke malware that ends up on your PC. Good online security can’t be covered by a single piece of software, much less lone feature. Scams, phishing attacks, exploits, and other threats continue to proliferate in variety and frequency. Read...

The president also said `only really bad people` want to stoke theories about the well-connected sex offender. Read...

General practitioners from US, Canada and Singapore will soon have their applications processed within two months. Read...

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan has set a groundbreaking record: a data transmission rate of 1.02 petabits per second (around 127,500 GB/s) over 1,802 kilometers (about 1,120 miles), reports CNET. That’s around 350,000 times faster than the average US fixed broadband internet connection, which was around 289 Mbps according to Speedtest as of May 2025. At this new record-breaking speed, you could download the entire Netflix library in under a second. Fiber optics with 19 cores The key to the record is a new optical fiber with 19 cores, which are installed in a cable with a diameter of just 0.125 millimeters (the standard size for existing networks). Compared to conventional cables with one core, this fiber transmits 19 times more data with minimal data loss due to uniform light conduction. For transmission over the 1,120-mile distance—comparable to New York to Chicago—the signal was amplified 21 times. The new record more than doubles the previous year’s figure of 50,250 GB/s. In 2023, the NICT team achieved similar speeds but only over a third of the distance. Advances in signal amplification and reduction of data loss are what made this new range possible. Compatible with existing fiber optic cables The technology could meet the growing demand for data worldwide, as data volumes have been increasing by about 50 percent annually according to Nielsen’s Law. In general, the new technology is exciting and also interesting for countries where fiber optic expansion is stagnating, primarily because these new cables fit into existing infrastructures. The record has not yet been independently verified, but it shows how fiber optics could further shape the future of the internet. Read...

Sage appoints Damon Scarr as General Manager for Asia Pacific to drive growth and expand its AI-powered finance solutions across the region. Read...

Henare won`t say yet whether he`ll contest Tamaki Makaurau in the 2026 general election. Read...

Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro will represent Aotearoa in Rarotonga. Read...

Google is trying to shove its “AI” into all of its products at once. You can’t use Search, Android, or Chrome without being prompted to try out some flavor of Gemini. But maybe wait a bit before you let Google’s large language model summarize your Gmail messages… because apparently it’s easy to get it passing along phishing attempts. Google Gemini for Workspace includes a feature that summarizes the text in an email, using the Gmail interface, but not necessarily an actual Gmail address. A vulnerability submitted to Mozilla’s 0din AI bug bounty program (spotted by BleepingComputer) found an easy way to game that system: just hide some text at the end of an email with white font on a white background so it’s essentially invisible to the reader. The lack of links or attachments means it won’t trigger the usual spam protections. And you can probably guess what comes next. Instructions in that “invisible” text cue the Gemini auto-generated summary to alert the user that their password has been compromised and that they should call a certain phone number to reset it. In this hypothetical scenario, there’s an identity thief waiting on the other end of the line, ready to steal your email account and any other information that might be connected to it. A hidden “Admin” tag in the text can make sure that Gemini will include the text verbatim in the summary. It’s important to note that this is only a theoretical attack at the moment, and it hasn’t been seen “in the wild” at the time of writing. The Gemini “Summarize this email” feature is currently only available to Workspace accounts, not the general public. (I imagine flipping that switch for a billion or two basic Gmail users might overtax even the big iron in Google’s mighty data centers.) But the ease with which users trust text generated by large language models, even when they appear to be in the midst of a religious delusion or a racist manifesto, is concerning to say the least. Spammers and hackers are already using LLMs and adjacent tools to spread their influence more efficiently. It seems almost inevitable that as users grow more reliant on AI to replace their work—and their thinking—these systems will be more effectively and regularly compromised. Read...