Newsy.co

Silicon Roundabout

Anthropic lays groundwork for bots that shop for you

Anthropic has blueprints for building e-commerce bots that shop on behalf of clients. That's not something many consumers want at the moment, but the AI biz this week published a set of templates for Claude-based shopping agents and merchant agents...

AMD's Threadripper Halo is a local-AI workstation for researchers with deep pockets

Machine learning researchers have a new and expensive option for doing local AI. AMD just raided its spare parts bin and cobbled together a DGX Station rival boasting up to 576 GB of HBM3e memory that it’s calling the Threadripper Halo. Announced at...

ASCII smuggling isn't just an AI security risk

Fraudsters have found a new use for ASCII smuggling, typically used to hide malicious prompts intended for AI models, in an old-school attack method: email phishing. Microsoft uncovered a massive phishing campaign using invisible Unicode tag charact...

Rogue OpenAI agents used dead German web site to communicate in May, months before Hugging Face incident

OpenAI’s agents were going rogue as early as May, according to a new report, making the Hugging Face incident far from the first where bots committed a breach. A report published Friday by a group of researchers claims to have found – with all of th...

Audacity 4 is a complete revamp of the ‘world’s most popular’ audio editor

Audacity 4 has been in the works for some time, and had its own mini controversy last year when an unfortunate redesigned logo started making the rounds. The final version of the new icon isn't nearly as bad as the early rendition that was circ...

My Word. Microsoft's prepping Similarity Checker for retirement

Microsoft is retiring Word's Similarity Checker on October 3 and stripping the feature from Microsoft Editor. Other writing and editing tools, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, won't be affected. But if an organization uses Similarity Checker as part...

Canonical shuttering some of its legacy chat channels

Canonical is closing off some of its older tools and communications channels for users, although some may remain – just unofficially. Back in May, Canonical’s Aaron Prisk announced on Discord that the company was closing the Ubuntu Pastebin at the e...

Microsoft to bounce mail from outdated Exchange servers

Microsoft is upping the ante on Exchange Server security, warning that outdated on-premises systems will soon be blocked from sending email to Exchange Online. From the second week of September, Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 machines that send email...

The White House is making arcade games racist

Trump’s racist new “Build the Wall” game. | Image: The White House The PR masterminds at the White House just released a series of vaguely policy-themed "arcade" games, some of which are racist - and modeled on real games whose copyright holde...

PostgreSQL 19 connects the dots with standardized graph queries

PostgreSQL 19 is set to add standardized SQL syntax for querying property graphs. The open source database has steadily grown in popularity over the last five years, becoming the most popular among developers for the first time in 2023. Speaking to...

JavaScript installer pnpm recast in Rust because ECMAScript can't keep up

The popular JavaScript package manager pnpm, already known for its speedy downloads, has further cut installation times by up to 90 percent thanks to a complete rewrite in Rust. Yet the freshly released version 12 of pnpm should not cause consternat...

GoPro says it’s still committed ‘to your collective stoke’

GoPro CEO Nick Woodman said in a letter to customers that making cameras is still his company's "core DNA," after a proposed $285 million acquisition by Starman was announced earlier this week. He claims the merger puts GoPro in a better positi...

Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip

It's not quite the "push button; get song" of Suno, but Roland's new Melody Flip tool marks the company's foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 "Palettes,"...

Cloud snail-mail service Docmail enters third day stuck in the outbox

UPDATED Docmail, a service used by more than 30,000 UK businesses and public sector organizations, has been offline for several days, prompting concern among users. Operated by CFH Docmail Ltd, the cloud-based hybrid mail service allows users to sen...

AGI is whatever you want it to be

OpenAI announced its next big model, GPT-6 Astra, and also, by the way, that "the AGI era" is here now.Today on The Vergecast, we've got an all-star panel to break down the news of the week.First, senior AI reporter Hayden Field joins us to tal...

Wayve and Uber steal a march on Waymo with paid self-driving London rides

Wayve and Uber have launched self-driving rides in London, but what's more interesting is what is planned for the next few months and years. As of today, the plan is for 15 electric Ford Mustangs, equipped with the Wayve AI driver, to roam the capit...

Microsoft says virtually nobody was grabbing NYT articles through its chatbot

Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers inc...

Enjoy the Windows 10 Update Experience at London's O2

BORK!BORK!BORK! Windows 10 is lingering on after its friends have gone home, plaintively flickering out an update notification on a digital sign at London's O2 arena. The sign was advertising the venue and some of the activities available inside, in...

US law firm accuses UK AI software firm of unwanted contract renewal when it tried to leave

A US law firm is alleging that UK-based telecoms and software company ConnexAI sold it software and AI systems that failed to perform as the vendor claimed, and then unlawfully renewed its contract. ConnexAI has rejected the allegations. The dispute...

Alienware’s refurbished 16 Aurora is almost $200 off at Woot

Gaming laptop deals aren’t what they used to be (stares daggers at RAMageddon), which is why I consider Woot’s deal on a refurbished Alienware 16 Aurora gaming laptop with Nvidia’s RTX 5050 a pretty good deal at $927 for new Woot customers (wit...