By Deepti Pathak Thinking about getting a 3D printer but unsure what to buy in 2025? The world of…
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By Hisan Kidwai Tower defense games are a staple on Roblox, and one of the best right now is…
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By Nick Godt Mitsubishi re-enters the EV scene with an EV slated for 2026.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nick Godt Zoox, Amazon’s robotaxi unit, issues a safety recall after a Las Vegas crash.

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After announcing in February that Skype would be discontinued, Microsoft has officially killed off the once-popular communications platform. Users accessing any of Skype’s services will now be encouraged to use Microsoft Teams instead.

Microsoft originally bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011 to replace its own Windows Live Messenger platform. Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Danish Janus Friis.

Skype quickly became known as the communications platform that popularized video calls. But after Microsoft’s purchase, the software slowly but surely lost users as video calls became increasingly available on more platforms.

Microsoft started to merge Skype with Teams in 2017, and the focus on Teams further accelerated when remote working became the norm during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source:: Computer World

Should Apple have abandoned its lawsuit against Israeli mercenary spyware vendor NSO Group — the company it once described as, “21st century mercenaries who have created highly sophisticated cyber-surveillance machinery that invites routine and flagrant abuse.” Perhaps not, but it’s still heart-warming to learn NSO has been slammed with a huge $168 million fine for spying on WhatsApp.

Mercenaries in your machine

The NSO is one of the most renowned of a multitude of surveillance-as-a-service companies exploiting complex and expensive hacks to break into people’s digital devices and spy on them, frequently for oppressive governments.

That the spyware sector is thriving is a grim reflection of our deeply amoral age. Its existence should encourage everyone to invest in more security, rather than demand less, even at the encryption-eroding UK Home Office. But, I digress.

NSO Group broke into the mainstream in 2019 when reports emerged showing the extent to which its Pegasus spyware had been used against 1,400 WhatsApp messages in addition to attacks against iPhones. 

Pegasus was an insidious attack that, once installed, granted total access to compromised devices. It turned people’s phone records, emails, messages, video content, and location data into open books, and could even be used to activate cameras and microphones to engage in remote surveillance.

Litigation potentially raised the risk

Both Apple and Facebook began litigation against NSO Group, but Apple withdrew its attempt last year, arguing that continuing in the claim could undermine the systems it has built to secure its ecosystem. “While Apple continues to believe in the merits of its claims, it has also determined that proceeding further with this case has the potential to put vital security information at risk,” it told the court.

WhatsApp continued its case, which it has now won, winning what sounds like a lot: $168 million in compensation. 

Since then, NSO Group and others like it have been embroiled in numerous attacks against a huge range of targets, including human rights protectors, opposition parties, dissidents, journalists and others on behalf of a range of governments, including those with very poor human rights records. 

That’s not how the company sees itself, of course. “We firmly believe that our technology plays a critical role in preventing serious crime and terrorism and is deployed responsibly by authorized government agencies,” said NSO spokesman Gil Lainer via email. 

Is that right?

Meta claims NSO repeatedly targeted people involved in its case against the company, which undermines the claim to be on the right side of history. The legal defenses it put up in court were equally evasive.

The company delivers attacks that are complex, sophisticated, and cost a lot of money to mount, which means most people don’t need to worry about being attacked this way, while those that do should be using Apple’s Lockdown Mode. These attacks often require no user input whatsoever and can begin with a missed call or an unrequested message. 

With many thousands of people seemingly affected by these attacks, and with OS providers shouldering the additional cost of mitigating against such attacks, it’s pretty clear NSO Group will likely see the fine as a small tax on earnings. 

This fine is small change

The thing is, $168 million may well be peanuts to NSO Group. Six years ago, The New York Times reported that the market for digital espionage systems of this kind had already reached past $12 billion. Just last year, it was reported the company charged a “standard price” of $7 million for simultaneous access to hack 15 devices. 

Targeting individuals outside of national borders cost people $1 million or $2 million dollars a pop. (These exploits were widely used internationally — even the CIA and FBI used the software, paying more than $7 million for the privilege, before its use was banned.) 

But the company wasn’t just generating plenty of money in exchange for undermining digital security for one or two individuals, it’s been implicated in smashing the digital windows belonging to thousands of people. 

No one is safe until everyone is safe

For enterprise users, the implications are stark. It means that if you or your business is involved in some way with national security or possesses unique business secrets, you can no longer assume your data is at all safe. For as long as companies such as NSO Group exist, your data is just waiting for a competitor to pick up the phone, cough up the cash, and get some mercenary spyware company to break it out. This seems a very sub-optimal reality in digital transformation.

Rather than stopping the company in its tracks, the fine could just cause NSO to raise prices a little, I imagine. The risk remains and is real. And these attacks will trickle down.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

By Thomas Macaulay Have you heard of the privacy paradox? It’s the contradiction between our claims to care about privacy — and our refusal to protect it. The paradox came to mind while working on the debut episode of our brand-new podcast: TNW Backstage. The show takes you behind the scenes of TNW Conference — and the tech shaping our world. Our first episode features a standout guest: Ron de Jesus, the world’s first Field Chief Privacy Officer. The conversation explores the evolution of privacy threats. One hot topic is Meta’s controversial “pay or consent” model, which gives users a stark choice: allow ad-tracking…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Siôn Geschwindt The beat just dropped on a new era of music, and it’s coming not from a recording studio but from the weird and wonderful realm of quantum physics. UK-based tech startup Moth has released the track “Recurse” in collaboration with British electronic artist ILĀ. It’s billed as the world’s first commercially available song created using “quantum-powered generative AI.” “Recurse” certainly sounds otherworldly — like the kind of music aliens might stream while drifting through deep space. Yet again, that is kind of ILĀ’s style. Give it a listen: https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2025/05/ila_Recurse.mp3 You can listen to the track yourself on all major streaming…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Blair Marnell There’s one episode of Daredevil: Born Again that Charlie Cox really doesn’t like at all.

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By Deepti Pathak Tired of dull stone and wood in your Minecraft builds? Terracotta is one of the most…
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By Nick Godt Jeep unveils electric version of the Compass SUV but it might not make it stateside.

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By Siôn Geschwindt Dutch startup Eyeo has emerged from stealth with €15mn in funding to advance a breakthrough photonics technology for cameras that could radically disrupt the way we take images. Eyeo spun out last year from Belgium’s Imec, one of the world’s leading nanoelectronics centres. The startup’s waveguide colour-splitting technology — an optical technique that uses tiny structures to guide and separate light by wavelength — triples the light sensitivity of today’s best image sensors.  Eyeo’s sensors allow all sorts of cameras, from DSLRs to those in smartphones and virtual reality headsets, to capture brighter, clearer images, especially in low-light conditions. The…This story continues at The Next Web

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In case you skipped the memo, India is engaged in a widespread digital transformation across the country and its economy — and Apple’s investments locally are examples of this broad change.

It’s reasonably evident if you stop to consider what’s going on. Apple and its supply chain are investing billions in creating new manufacturing centers across India, and those investments drive further spending on infrastructure – roads, accommodation, and growth in service industries feeding them all. It means longer runways, better airports, improved property construction, more modern city management infrastructure, banking, rail, and more. 

Build them up…

One good illustration is the story emerging around Foxconn’s new iPhone manufacturing city in Devenahalli, north of Bengaluru, India. The $2.5 billion factory, set to be Foxconn’s second-largest outside China, will occupy the space of 220 football fields and create 40,000 jobs. National and state investment to support of the project is being seen in property construction and infrastructure. Regional property prices are rising rapidly as a result.

These investments support a consumer electronics manufacturing industry racing to set itself up in the country. They all drive jobs, of course, though it’s important to note that if the same investments took place in so-called developed economies, the cost of those investments would be cripplingly high, and the skills required would be absent. 

Foxconn’s investment isn’t unique. India’s huge Tata Group is also investing in the Apple supply chain, component suppliers are building out their presence there, and just this week we learned AirPods supplier Jabil is also preparing to build a second factory in India’s Tamil Nadu region as AirPods manufacturing begins there. (Apple currently makes Macs and iPads in Vietnam as well as in China).

Apple to make all its iPhones in India?

The other side of all this investment is digital. 

When it comes to fixed broadband, India is one of those nations that had weaknesses in coverage, but this is changing as network infrastructure is deployed. The scale is significant. Speaking at a Bharat Telecom event, India’s Union Minister for Communications and Development of North Eastern Region, Jyotiraditya Scindia, described the rapid scale of deployment: In just 22 months, we connected 99% of our villages with 5G and brought 82% of our population onto the network, deploying 470,000 towers — this is not evolution; it is a telecom revolution,” he said. 

“This is not evolution; it is a telecom revolution,” Scindia said. 

Apple fans will be interested in something else he claimed: “Apple has decided to source and produce all its mobile phones in India in the coming years,” he said. 

Recent speculation has been that Apple will make all its iPhones for the US market in India; this is the first time we’ve heard that it might make all the iPhones it sells worldwide there.

Given that China is Apple’s second-largest market, I’m inclined to think the company hopes to continue production there to serve Chinese consumers, while opening up a third front for manufacturing in Brazil in the coming months; that would keep it from becoming completely reliant on one nation for its iPhone supply chain.

All the same, it’s not impossible that having invested so deeply in nurturing its business in India Apple has now decided to increase iPhone manufacturing there beyond current expectations. Time will tell. 

Apple isn’t the only company taking a position in India. Many other electronics firms are working to build up their business, too, like Apple, also hoping to mitigate some of the damaging effects of US tariffs on international trade. They recognize, as so many do, that unless US consumers still enjoy access to affordable consumer goods, inflation, shortages, and unemployment loom. All the same, the migration to new production centers will take time, given the degree of investment required.

Apple, for example, has spent almost a decade building toward this transition.

The network opportunity

The flipside to all of this activity is that national infrastructure is being improved, which opens opportunities beyond manufacturing. Services, Apple’s other strong business, also seem set to benefit from the investments in network connectivity. Can more focus on Apple TV in India be far behind?

A survey commissioned by Amazon revealed a strong appetite for movie and TV streaming in India, a need that can now be met by more people in more regions of the country thanks to the expansion of network infrastructure. That’s driving rapid growth in India’s app economy, according to Apple.

Developers in India generated around $5 billion in sales last year, the company said. “The App Store has been an economic miracle for developers in India and all around the world, and we’re thrilled to support their work,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook.

So, what am I saying? Only that when considering Apple’s business in India, it’s important to put it into context, and once you do so it’s hard to ignore that the confluence of different forces required to support Apple’s investment means smaller enterprises can perhaps identify their own opportunities now, thanks to India’s investments in physical and digital infrastructure. While other markets get closed down, it looks as if India is open to business – though it remains to be seen the extent to which India’s emerging economic miracle will come at the cost of one of its closest neighbors, China.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

Only 1% of enterprise data has so far been accessed by generative AI (genAI) models because of a lack of integration and coordination between numerous data centers, cloud services and edge environments, according to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. And for that to change, smaller, special-purpose genAI models tailored to specific domain tasks such as HR, sales, retail and manufacturing, will needed.

Speaking at IBM’s Think 2025 conference in Boston on Tuesday, Krishna laid out his company’s focus for the future: integrating both open-source large language models (LLMs) and small language models that can be easily deployed and customized by whatever enterprise is using them.

“Smaller models are incredibly accurate,” Krishna said. “They’re much, much faster. They’re much more cost effective to run. And you can choose to run them where you want. It’s not a substitute for larger [AI] models, it’s an ‘and’ with the larger models you can now tailor … to enterprise needs.”

As well as being simpler to deploy and customize, smaller AI models are as much as 30 times less expensive to run than more conventional LLMs, he said.

Just as the cost of storage and computing have dropped dramatically since the 1990s, AI technology will also become significantly cheaper over time, Krishna said. “As that happens, you can throw [AI] at a lot more problems,” he said. “There’s no law in computer science that says AI must remain expensive and large. That’s the engineering challenge we’re taking on.”

Krishna highlighted IBM’s Granite family of open-source AI models – smaller models with between 3 billion and 20 billion parameters — and how they compare to LLMs such as GPT-4, which has more than 1 trillion parameters. (OpenAI, Meta and other AI model builders are also focused on creating “mini” models of their larger platforms, such as GPT o3 and GPT o4 mini, and Llama 2 and Llama 3, all of which are reported to have 8 billion or fewer parameters.)

IBM’s latest Granite 3.0 models are integrated into its WatsonX platform, the company’s AI and data platform that’s designed to help enterprises build, train, tune, and deploy AI models at scale — especially for specific business applications. Granite 3.0 was introduced last October and is part of IBM’s broader strategy to provide scalable, efficient, and customizable AI solutions for business

“The era of AI experimentation is over,” Krishna said. “Success is going to be defined by integration and business outcomes. That’s what we’re announcing today. With our WatsonX Orchestrate family of products, you can build your own agent in less than five minutes.”

WatsonX Orchestrate also comes with 150 pre-built AI models for various purposes.

To enable AI-embedded networking to connect geographically dispersed data sources, IBM and telecom company Lumen Technologies announced a partnership during Think. The two will focus on creating real-time AI inferencing closer to where data is generated, which should reduce cost and latency and address security barriers as companies scale up genAI adoption.

Lumen CEO Kate Johnson said her company is launching its largest network upgrade and expansion in decades; Lumen’s networks will now run WatsonX at the edge, enabling more secure access to data where it’s being created, overcoming the latency issues that can arise on more traditional networks.

“We bring the power of proximity to companies that are trying to get the most out of their AI,” she said. “Imagine working with your AI models and constantly sending all that data back to the cloud and waiting for it. It’s costly, it’s slow, it’s not nearly as secure. Our combined capabilities with WatsonX at the edge enables real-time inferencing.

“All the edge locations are connected to the fabric,” Johnson said. “It’s ubiquitous and covers all the use cases.”

For example, genAI can be used in clinical settings for real-time diagnostics of patient records. As a patient is examined, that data is fed into a local database, which can be accessed by genAI and combined with historical data from another location – a hospital’s data center.

“That’s game-changing and potentially lifesaving,” Johnson said.

Johnson also illustrated how AI will work at the edge with a lights-out manufacturing facility, run almost completely by robotics and generating terabytes of data in order to run.

“Every millisecond matters. What we’re seeing is factories are looking for proximity data centers, from networking to power and cooling, and our combined solution gives them something pretty powerful right out of the box,” she said.

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt German drone maker Quantum Systems has raised €160mn at a valuation north of €1bn, becoming Europe’s latest defence tech unicorn.   Quantum Systems builds electric, AI-powered autonomous surveillance drones that are dual-use, meaning they can serve both military and civil purposes.   Defence forces can use the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to spy on enemies and gather intel. The drones can also be used by farmers to inspect their crops, by energy companies to check power lines, and by search and rescue teams to look for survivors.   Florian Seibel, co-CEO and co-founder of Quantum Systems, said the company was ready to become…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Deepti Pathak Ever curious about how they create those shiny glass walls or upscale see-through floors in Minecraft?…
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By Hisan Kidwai It’s no secret that the world within Minecraft is huge, with many things to do and…
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In the latest act of the Apple-does-AI drama, the company is allegedly working with Google/Amazon-backed start-up Anthropic PBC to build AI-powered coding tools for developers, Bloomberg reports.

The move leans into this year’s fastest-emerging AI buzz-word, “vibe-coding” and means developers will be able to get AI-equipped dev tools to write, edit, and test code on their behalf. It relies on AI agents to generate code.

New features integrating Apple’s take on this will be integrated within its Xcode development environment, which might use Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet AI model, Bloomberg reported. Apple has been hoping to integrate AI into Xcode for some time.

Play it again, Claude 

With a growing reputation among developers, Claude has become a widely used chatbot across the AI community for a range of different tasks. 

Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead, DevOps and Application Development at The Futurum Group, told Devops: “Anthropic’s Claude Code is the developer’s AI developer tool.” In that kind of context, an Apple embrace makes sense if the reports are true.

Are they true? Apple hasn’t said anything about these plans, and I expect it has no intention of doing so this side of WWDC next month — if then.

The report says Apple intends to deploy the software internally at first and is apparently “undecided” on a public launch – but it could face some consternation from within its developer community if it doesn’t hint at something.

What about Swift Assist?

Apple has something like this in development in-house, the previously-announced Swift Assist tech. It was originally intended to ship last year but hasn’t yet appeared.

It’s assumed that development of Swift Assist, like development of so much that we were promised for Siri, foundered and the software remains unready. We don’t know much about why, but a propensity for hallucinations could be to blame.

Apple has since changed Siri’s leadership teams, bringing in its very best engineers to rescue efforts to make Siri smart again. This important work has also seen some senior leaders shunted aside, or even quietly demoted, enabling new teams a fresh start at cleaning up the problems left behind.

Within this last-ditch rescue attempt, Apple has adopted a “by any means necessary” approach to improving Siri. That approach includes using third-party solutions where it makes sense, rather than continuing to plow dev ground that hasn’t born fruit yet. This is likely what the reported partnership with Anthropic represents, suggesting Swift Assist will be either a more limited-than-intended suite of tools or rely on some kind of integration with third-party software such as Claude. 

Of course, until the rumors emerge via the usual outlets, the actual deployment model remains a matter for conjecture. That may also be true inside Apple, given that the go-to-market strategy still seems undecided based on the Bloomberg story. 

What’s the attraction of Claude? 

Anthropic’s Claude has been built to handle tasks more advanced than pattern recognition or text generation; it can create HTML, CSS, debugging code, and it can turn images into structured JSON data. Those abilities have obvious uses for app developers, potentially cutting costs and ramping up productivity. Apple also knows it needs to deliver tools like these as developers are rapidly growing to expect them — all major OS developers are embracing them.

That’s certainly what Anthropic CEO Drio Amodei expects will happen. In March, he explained that he expects AI will write the code for software engineers within three to six months and would be generating every line of code within a year. “I have a fair amount of concern” for jobs in the field, he said, warning of more impact in the future. Amodei said that while humans are needed today to make code that people like, over time AI will learn to do that on its own.

“I think that will happen in every industry,” he said. 

If this is true, then perhaps the limited in-person developer events now hosted in Cupertino will eventually be large enough to host all the human Apple developers that exist one day. 

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Source:: Computer World

By Blair Marnell Want to know what’s happening with Bucky after Thunderbolts? Sebastian Stan offers an update on where he stands.

Source:: Digital Trends

The Israeli company behind the obscure messaging app former US national security advisor Mike Waltz was photographed using on his iPhone last week was recently hacked, it has been alleged.

The app in question, TM SGNL, is a modified version of the more famous Signal app senior administration officials got themselves into hot water for using in March when The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added by Waltz to a classified chat.

No sooner had Waltz been photographed using TM SGNL than researchers started trying to find the app. That didn’t prove to be easy: Unlike Signal, TM SGNL is non-public and can’t be downloaded from the Apple App Store or Google’s Play Store.

Source:: Computer World