By Siôn Geschwindt Norwegian software firm Visma has provisionally picked London for its IPO next year. It could mark a rare win for the UK’s troubled stock market — if Downing Street pulls through on its promised reforms.  British private equity firm Hg acquired a 70% stake in Visma in 2006 at a £380mn (€445mn) valuation. The company, which makes accounting, payroll, and HR software products, is now worth an estimated €19bn.  Visma previously considered listing in Amsterdam but has since turned its sights to the British capital, according to the Financial Times.  Its IPO would run counter to the recent trend of…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Deepti Pathak Are you having trouble with your Fire TV Stick remote not responding? Or are you setting…
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By Deepti Pathak Fortnite’s Crew subscription is a fantastic value, but if you’ve already made up your mind to…
The post How To Cancel Fortnite Crew Subscription: PC, PS5, XBOX, & More appeared first on Fossbytes.

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When MS-DOS 5.0 was released in 1991, one of the big innovations was the MS-DOS Editor, a classic text editor that quickly became popular with users. Now, Microsoft has developed a new version of MS-DOS Editor called Edit, according to Ars Technica.

Compared to the original, Edit offers a number of improvements, including support for Unicode. In addition, the 300-kilobyte limit has been removed, meaning users can work with gigabyte-sized files if they want.

Edit was written in the Rust programming language and is based on open-source code. And it doesn’t require Windows to run; the text editor works just as well on macOS or Linux.

If you want to try Edit, it can be downloaded from Github.

Source:: Computer World

Google subsidiary Deepmind has unveiled Gemini Robotics On-Device, a new version of the Gemini AI model meant to be used in robots and work without an internet connection. The new model reportedly supports natural language, making it easy to control the robot’s movements.

In terms of performance, Gemini Robotics On-Device performs almost as well as the connected Gemini Robotics, Techcrunch reports.

Developers interested in working with Gemini Robotics On-Device can download the Gemini Robotics SDK from Github.

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Europe’s best-funded space tech firm, Isar Aerospace, plans to strengthen the continent’s access to orbital satellites after raising €150mn to expand its launch service. Daniel Metzler, Isar’s CEO and co-founder, said the investment reflects “strong confidence” in the company’s mission to become a new European space leader. “We are catering to the rising global demand for satellite launch services and provide global markets and governments with independent and flexible access to space,” he said.  Founded in 2018 as a spin-off from Technical University Munich, Isar aims to lower the cost and complexity of launching small to medium-sized satellites by offering…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Siôn Geschwindt Ethics-focused phone makers Fairphone and Murena have unveiled their latest collaboration: the Murena Fairphone (Gen 6), a smartphone that pairs repairable hardware with privacy-focused software.  The release coincides with the launch of the Fairphone 6, which runs on Android. The Murena edition swaps Google’s ecosystem for /e/OS, an open-source operating system designed to minimise data collection.  The new device builds on the foundation laid by the Murena Fairphone 5, which promised a 10-year lifespan and a higher bar for sustainable electronics.  The Murena Fairphone 6 comes with an /e/OS operating system that promises better privacy over Android or Apple. Credit:…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Deepti Pathak Vivo has launched the T4 Lite 5G in India, adding strength to the company’s budget T-series…
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By Hisan Kidwai Garena Free Fire Max is one of the most popular games on the planet, and for…
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New research released Tuesday on the data collection and sharing practices of leading large language models reveals that organizations such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft are collecting sensitive data and sharing it with unknown third parties.

And according to the findings from Incogni, a personal data removal services and data privacy company, businesses may face even greater risks than the multitude of individuals who use the various LLMs. It doesn’t help that, it said, “every analyzed privacy policy required college-level reading ability to interpret.”

“Employees frequently use generative AI tools to help draft internal reports or communications, not realizing that this can result in proprietary data becoming part of the model’s training dataset,” a release stated. “This lack of safeguards not only exposes individuals to unwanted data sharing, but could also lead to sensitive business data being reused in future interactions with other users, creating privacy, compliance, and competitive risks.”

Ron Zayas, the CEO of Ironwall by Incogni, the company’s B2B and B2G (business to government) division, said in an interview, “the analogy would be that we spend a lot of time as businesses making sure that our emails are secure, making sure that our machines lock themselves down after a certain period of time, of following SOC 2 protocols, all these things to protect information.” But now, he said, the concern is that “we’ve opened the door, and we have employees feeding information to engines that will process that and use it [perhaps in responses to competitors or foreign governments].”

To evaluate the LLMs, Incogni developed a set of 11 criteria that allowed it to assess the privacy risk in each, and compiled the results to determine each program’s privacy ranking in the areas of training, transparency, and data collection and sharing. From these, it also derived an overall rating.

Key findings in the report revealed that:

Le Chat by Mistral AI is the “least privacy invasive platform, with ChatGPT and Grok following closely behind. These platforms performed the best when it comes to how transparent they are on how they use and collect data, and how easy it is to opt out of having personal data used to train underlying models.”

LLM platforms developed by the biggest tech companies turned out to be the most privacy-invasive, the report said, with Meta AI (Meta) being the worst, followed by Gemini (Google) and Copilot (Microsoft).

Gemini, DeepSeek, Pi AI, and Meta AI don’t seem to allow users to opt out of having prompts used to train the models.

ChatGPT turned out to be the most transparent about whether prompts will be used for model training, and it had a clear privacy policy.

Grok (xAI) may share photos provided by users with third parties.

Meta.ai “shares names, email addresses and phone numbers with external entities, including research partners and corporate group members.”

Justin St-Maurice, technical counselor at Info-Tech Research Group, said that from a corporate perspective, “training your staff on what not to put into tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Meta’s AI is critical.”

He added, “just as people are taught not to post private or sensitive information on social media, they need similar awareness when using generative AI tools. These platforms should be treated as public, not private. Putting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or proprietary company data into these systems is no different than publishing it on a blog. If you wouldn’t post it on LinkedIn or Twitter, don’t type it into ChatGPT. The good news? You can do a lot with these tools without needing to expose sensitive data.”

According to St-Maurice, “if you’re worried about Meta or Google sharing your data, you should reconsider your overall platform choices; this isn’t really about how LLMs process your data, but how these large corporations handle your data more generally.”

Privacy concerns are important, he said, “but it doesn’t mean organizations should avoid large language models altogether. If you’re hosting models yourself, on-prem or through secure cloud services like Amazon Bedrock, you can ensure that no data is retained by the model.”

St-Maurice pointed out that, in these scenarios, “the LLM functions strictly as a processor, like your laptop’s CPU. It doesn’t ‘remember’ anything you don’t store and pass back into it yourself. Build your systems so that the LLM does the thinking, while you retain control over memory, data storage, and user history. You don’t need OpenAI or Google to unlock the value of LLMs; host your own internal models, and cut out the risk of third-party data exposure entirely.”

What people don’t understand, added Ironwall’s Zayas, “is that all this information is not only being sucked in, it’s being repurposed, it’s being reused. It’s being publicized out there, and it’s going to be used against you.”

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Communication with a privately funded European space capsule was lost Tuesday shortly after the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere.  The capsule launched on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Monday. The Exploration Company, which built the spacecraft, described the mission as a “partial success” and a “partial failure.” “The capsule was launched successfully, powered the payloads nominally in orbit, stabilised itself after separation with the launcher, re-entered and re-established communication after blackout,” the Munich-based startup said in a LinkedIn post today.  “But it encountered an issue afterwards, based on our current best knowledge, and we lost…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Apple device management vendor Mosyle has introduced AccessMule, an easy-to-use workflow platform designed to address a specific set of small business needs related to granting, managing, auditing, sharing, storing, and removing employee access from company systems.

These protections are particularly important when on-boarding and off-boarding employees. 

To understand why this matters, it’s important to consider that the main source of cybersecurity breaches among all businesses is not hackers per se, but intentional or unintentional actions performed by employees. That human factor is behind 74% of all security breaches, according to 2023 research from Verizon.

Mosyle has its own research to explain the problem. 

Employee access is a time bomb

According to that data:

Around 87% of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) say they cannot immediately verify which employees have access to company permissions.

Roughly the same percent of SMBs also fail to promptly revoke employee access when they leave.

Nearly 90% of companies have found former employees still have access to company applications and files, even after they leave the company.

None of these risks are good, of course — particularly in the context of an unravelling consensus around cybersecurity. So, it makes sense for companies to put sufficient protections in place today rather than face attacks in the future. 

Mosyle encountered challenges managing the on/off-boarding process at first. “The decision to build AccessMule was born out of necessity at Mosyle” said the company’s CEO, Alcyr Araujo. “Later, we realized it wasn’t just a gap for our organization, but a fundamental problem that needed to be solved for all SMBs. We’re launching AccessMule today as an independent subsidiary that will empower organizations with a high-quality, secure and efficient access and password management platform at an affordable price.”

What does AccessMule provide?

Mosyle’s wholly-owned service provider will provide a range of tools designed to defend against the consequences of lax employee security. The main focus is to automate those elements of access control that SMBs often fail to manage. That means tools to automate onboarding and offboarding processes, along with controls to assign access based on roles and overall oversight reporting so it is possible to check who has corporate access at any given time. 

Additional features include bult-in password management, safe password sharing, encryption sharing, and support for shared multi-factor authentication (MFA). Role-based access control (RBAC) features grant permissions in bulk, making it easy to assign permissions for new employees based on their role with a single action. All of these tools and services are available via an easy-to-use portal, the company said. The idea is that IT can maintain oversight on device and employee security, helping them better protect their company.

The ever booming Apple enterprise

Mosyle’s is just one of a range of announcements to emerge from across Apple’s enterprise value chain since WWDC. Just last week, Jamf published its own in-depth Apple-focused security report, while open-source device management vendor Fleet recently announced $27 million in new series B funding to help accelerate development of its own open platform for both cloud- and self-hosted device management for organizations of all kinds. Another vendor, Addigy, recently introduced its own new security partnership with CyberFOX. 

It is usual for Apple’s enterprise partners to begin making service announcements subsequent to WWDC. This is usually inspired by Apple’s moves to enhance enterprise support in its products at the event. It is possible that all reputable Apple device management partners have now begun working with the new Apple betas and enterprise features it is building for introduction this fall.

Apple at WWDC introduced a host of new enterprise-focused improvements, including better support for Apple Accounts in the enterprise, improvements in device management, and a significant enhancement in the quality and quantity of device information IT can access from across their fleets. The latter means tech will even be able to audit MAC address, Activation Lock statues, storage, and cellular information, as well as AppleCare coverage. Platform SSO, App management, and device sharing tools were also improved at WWDC.

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Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Danish biotech Cellugy has raised €8.1mn in EU funding to accelerate production of a biodegradable material designed to replace microplastics in cosmetics. The grant, awarded under the EU’s LIFE Programme for environmental projects, will support the commercialisation of EcoFLEXY, a cellulose-based material for use in personal care products such as creams, gels, and toothpaste.  Cellugy claims EcoFLEXY is the first material of its kind to match the performance of fossil-based carbomers, which are famed for their ability to give cosmetics a smooth, consistent texture and a long shelf life. Currently, carbomers dominate the global cosmetics market despite links to microplastic…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Partner Content To watch YouTube videos without buffering and play them on various devices, downloading YouTube videos to…
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By Hisan Kidwai Garena Free Fire Max is one of the most popular games on the planet, and for…
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Microsoft is laying the groundwork for Windows 11 to morph into a genAI-driven OS.

The company on Monday announced a critical AI technology that will make it possible to run generative AI (genAI) agents on Windows without Internet connectivity.

Microsoft’s small language model, called Mu, is designed to respond to natural language queries within the Windows OS, the company said in a blog post Monday. Mu takes advantage of the neural processing units (NPUs) of Copilot PCs, Vivek Pradeep, vice president and distinguished engineer for Windows Applied Sciences, said in the post.

Three chip makers — Intel, AMD and Qualcomm — provide NPUs in Copilot PCs prebuilt with Windows 11.

Mu already powers an agent that handles queries in the Settings menus in a preview version of Windows 11 available to early adopters with Copilot+ PCs. The feature is available in the Windows 11 preview version 26200.5651 that shipped  June 13. 

The model provides a better understanding and context of queries, and “has been designed to operate efficiently, delivering high performance while running locally,” Pradeep wrote.

Microsoft is aggressively pushing genAI features into the core of Windows 11 and Microsoft 365. The company introduced a new developer stack called Windows ML 2.0 last month for developers to make AI features accessible in software applications.

The company is also developing feature- or application-specific AI models for Microsoft 365 applications.

The 330-million parameter Mu model is designed to reduce AI computing cycles so it can run locally on Windows 11 PCs.  Laptops have limited hardware and battery life and need a cloud service for AI.

“This involved adjusting model architecture and parameter shapes to better fit the hardware’s parallelism and memory limits,” Pradeep wrote.

The model also generates high-quality responses with a better understanding of queries. Microsoft fine-tuned a custom Mu model for the Settings menu that could respond to ambiguous user queries on system settings. For example, the model can handle queries that do not specify whether to raise brightness on a main or secondary monitor.

The Mu encoder-decoder model breaks down large queries into a more compact representation of information, which is then used to generate responses. That’s different from large language models (LLMs), which are only decoder models and require all of the text to generate responses.

“By separating the input tokens from output tokens, Mu’s one-time encoding greatly reduces computation and memory overhead,” Pradeep said.

The encoder–decoder approach was significantly faster than LLMs such as Microsoft’s Phi-3.5, which is a decoder-only model. “When comparing Mu to a similarly fine-tuned Phi-3.5-mini, we found that Mu is nearly comparable in performance despite being one-tenth of the size,” Pradeep said.

Those gains are crucial for on-device and real-time applications. “Managing the extensive array of Windows settings posed its own challenges, particularly with overlapping functionalities,” Pradeep said.

The response time was under 500 milliseconds, which aligned with “goals for a responsive and reliable agent in Settings that scaled to hundreds of settings,” Pradeep said.

Microsoft has many genAI technologies that include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its latest homegrown Phi 4 model, which can generate images, video and text.

Source:: Computer World

In a world loaded with existential challenge, it should not surprise anyone that Apple faces its own crisis. It should do what any cornered animal will always do and fight hard and dirty to regain freedom. That’s why it’s of concern to once again learn this weekend that Apple is “considering” acquisitions in the generative AI (genAI) space, because by this time in the fight, I want that chatter to be about acquisitions that have been made. 

Look, anyone can consider making a purchase and then come up with a dozen reasons not to go through with it. That’s not hard at all, it’s the inevitable articulation of small-C conservatism, which tends to favor stasis over change. My concern is that Apple’s own growth mindset might have been replaced by a more conservative approach, which means that the company becomes really good at finding reasons not to do things, and less good at identifying when it really should do something.

No can’t be the default

Apple’s history is packed with conflict between good ideas the company rejected and brilliant ideas it chose to move forward with. It is arguable that some of the ideas the company has looked at historically are only now becoming viable devices. (I’m thinking of the speculated HomePod as an idea of that kind.) Apple executives have frequently discussed how the company is just as proud of the things it doesn’t do as of those it does. It’s a company instinctively good at saying “No” — until it finds a good reason to say “Yes.”

The problem is that when it comes to genAI, it still feels like there’s a lot of creative mileage to be had from injecting some creative chaos into the R&D crib. To achieve that, it seems necessary that Apple find the spleen to take a few risks on the M&A journey. 

The company can’t simply wander down to the genAI development shops and find reasons not to purchase things; it needs to pick up all the shiniest things it comes across, using whatever financial muscle it takes to ensure they end up in Apple’s hold rather than elsewhere. 

Why must it do this? Because genAI isn’t finished yet. 

The genAI evolution continues

Sure, Apple’s widely disclosed challenges with Siri mean it is motivated to try new approaches to push that project ahead, but the truth is that no one — not even OpenAI — really has genAI that is anything other than a hint of what this tech is likely to be able to accomplish in a decade or two. We are still early in the AI race, and that means today’s winners can still lose and those at the back of the pack have an opportunity to get ahead. 

So, it makes sense for Apple to take a few expensive risks, rather than staying inside the safe zone. Does Perplexity have a few tools that could boost Apple Intelligence? Then grab them. Are there others in AI with tools that could help make Siri smart and hardware products sing? 

Bring them in. Take risks. Get hungry, be foolish. Make it happen.

It is also worth thinking about retention at this point. 

Keep them keen

Several pieces by Mark Gurman in recent years tell us that in many cases, people Apple has hired on the purchase of their companies have subsequently jumped ship, as they did not find their happiness. If that is the case, that’s a problem that needs to be fixed; it suggests at least some of the assumptions the company has concerning how it works with its employees must be challenged, and new ways found to ensure acquired staffers actually want to stick around. 

Apple has tried stock options to boost retention. That’s not enough. Money helps, but as Maslow says, agency and empowerment are more important. Steve Jobs understood this, saying during his last D: All Things Digital interview in 2010, “If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, [you] have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy…. The best ideas have to win — otherwise good people don’t want to stay.” 

I’m not saying Apple has become hierarchical, though I look with suspicion at work-from-home mandates and opposition to employee unionization as hints that hierarchy exists in some parts of the company. What I am saying is that if the old M.O. isn’t working, and if the important new recruits the company needs to tackle genAI don’t want to stick around, then something’s got to change. And if that means a lot more collaboration and empowerment and a few internal changes in approach, that’s a small price to pay in contrast to the global opportunity to lead the AI-driven tech future on a planet seemingly owned by billionaires and technocrats.

Sometimes you got to play your hunches — how else are you going to find what you love?

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Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai The neckband category, which was once the norm for wireless earbuds, has become a rarity in…
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By Siôn Geschwindt A giant umbrella-like satellite fitted with European tech has revealed its first images of Earth’s surface. The probe, called “Biomass,” was built by a host of aerospace giants and startups for the European Space Agency (ESA). It launched in April on a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. European Astrotech, a UK-based startup, was responsible for fuelling the satellite ahead of takeoff. Biomass’ mission is to capture the most detailed measurements of forest carbon ever recorded from space. To get the job done, it’s been equipped with the first-ever P-band radar to enter orbit. It aims to…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai Garena Free Fire Max is one of the most popular games on the planet, and for…
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