Rubrik unveils Agent Cloud, promising real-time oversight, guardrails and rollback for risky AI agents embedded in enterprise systems. Read...

The government is proposing that intimate image abuse should be treated more severely. Read...

Zoho marks 30th anniversary by topping one million paying customers and 150 million users, with 2025 revenue up 20% year on year. Read...

Dyson launches its latest robot which seeks, identifies, and eliminates hidden stains using advanced AI. Read...

Next generation of air purifier brings high velocity airflow, five times longer HEPA filter life, capturing 99.97% of pollutants as small as 0.3 microns. Read...

Microsoft just announced a breakthrough in its push to commercialize Project Silica, its effort to etch data into glass as an archival medium: The company has successfully made the etching technique work with the type of glass used in oven doors. Previously, Project Silica used a special type of fused glass, good enough for research work but not for bringing the Silica technology to the mainstream. Now, Microsoft has made it work with borosilicate glass, the type of glass found in Pyrex containers. Silica otherwise remains the same. The goal has always been to store data “permanently,” in a medium that won’t degrade over time. Or close to it, anyway: The stated goal is to store data for over 10,000 years, and the company has previously tested it by etching movies like Superman into glass as a way to store them. A similar test archived music for future generations, too. Otherwise, even “archival” storage media can suffer from degradation. “Bit rot” can occur in everything from hard drives to recorded media like DVD-ROMs and rewritable optical media. Microsoft first experimented with encoding data into DNA, and then moved to Silica in 2019. Project Silica encodes data holographically into glass just 2mm thick, and still does — now, the glass being used is much more commercially available. While Microsoft said that the research phase of Silica is over, it didn’t indicate that production would begin. Microsoft said in a blog post that it will “consider learnings” from what it has discovered. Microsoft published its results in a new article in Nature. Microsoft also added that it has made advances in actually writing the data. Rather than use the polarization of the glass to encode the data, Microsoft can now use what it calls “phase voxels” — using the phase change of the glass instead. Many more of these voxels can now be written in parallel, Microsoft added. If polarization voxels are used instead, Microsoft said that it had found a way to simplify the writing process to just a pair of pulses. Finally, Microsoft said that it had applied machine learning to optimize symbol encodings, and to better identify how data could “age” within the glass. Of course, our descendants 10,000 years from now will need to be able to actually read the data. Let’s hope that Silica glass doesn’t end up as some archival Zip drive from the 21st century. Read...

Qodo 2.1 debuts an AI-driven rules layer that learns from code history to enforce consistent standards and analytics-led code review. Read...

It’s been forever since I last spotted a flash drive deal worth mentioning, and that’s all you need to know about the current state of storage prices. The AI-driven storage shortage is wreaking havoc on the market, which means if you need an excellent flash drive at a reasonable price, you’re gonna want to jump on this deal. Right now, you can get the 256GB version of the Samsung Bar Plus for $33 on Amazon, which is 37% down from its original $52. It’s far from the best price I’ve ever seen, but who knows how long it’ll be before storage prices go back down—if they even go back down at all. This USB-A flash drive is built for speed and resilience, hitting read speeds up to 400 MB/s for quick file transfers. The rugged metal casing is robust and durable, so your data won’t be lost even if you drop it from on high. It also doesn’t hurt that the Bar Plus is waterproof, shockproof, magnet-proof, temperature-proof, and X-ray-proof. It’s also compact and portable, with a lanyard hole for easy carrying. If you’re desperately in need of a great flash drive, get this 256GB Samsung Bar Plus before the price shoots back up. I honestly don’t know when the next discount will hit. If you want to save a bit more, you could also opt for the 128GB Samsung Bar Plus for $22. The 256GB Samsung Bar Plus flash drive is now $33 (was $52)Buy now via Amazon Read...

OpenAI is launching two new security features in ChatGPT to address growing threats to its AI systems, according to a recent blog post. As AI services increasingly connect to wider parts of the web and more external apps, the risk of so-called “prompt injection attacks” also increases. A prompt injection attack is when someone crafts a deceptive prompt in an attempt to trick the LLM into following malicious instructions and/or revealing sensitive information. One of the new features in ChatGPT is Lockdown Mode, an optional security mode aimed at users with high privacy requirements. This mode strictly limits how ChatGPT interacts with external systems. Certain tools and features are completely disabled, and web browsing is only allowed via cached content instead of direct network calls. Lockdown Mode will first be available to enterprise customers and will later be launched to consumers in the coming months. At the same time, clearer risk labeling will be introduced, with a uniform label bearing the text “Elevated Risk” for features that pose an increased security risk (for example, those that give AI tools network access). The labels will be visible in ChatGPT, ChatGPT Atlas, and Codex. Read...

AI looks set to start displacing a huge number of jobs, if predictions are to be believed and it could all happen very soon. Read...