A Tale of Transformation: The Rise and Fall of the Razed Casino in Australia

The Beginning of an Era

The story of the razed casino Australia begins in a time where glitz and glamour enveloped the sky above a bustling city. This casino blossomed in a prime location, attracting thrill-seekers and fortune-hunters alike. The grand opening was met with much fanfare, as lights flashed, music pulsed through the air, and games of chance promised a brief escape from reality.

From the outset, the razed casino was a modern marvel. It featured:

• State-of-the-art gaming machines
• Luxurious dining options helmed by renowned chefs
• Vibrant nightlife entertainment

Visitors were enamored by its aesthetic design, which seamlessly blended classic elegance with contemporary charm. This charming allure set the foundation for its early success.

The Thrill of Gaming Unveiled

As the razed casino flourished, it became a hub of entertainment, drawing a diverse crowd. Gamblers found themselves enticed by the variety of games available:

This array of options contributed significantly to the casino’s growing reputation as a premier gaming destination. Especially, slot machines became an instant favorite among tourists and locals alike, with players drawn to the colorful screens and enticing jackpots.

Factors Leading to Closure

However, the winds of fate began to shift, and the razed casino Australia faced a multitude of challenges that ultimately led to its downfall. Some key factors that contributed to its closure included:

1. Economic Downturn: A decline in the local economy left many potential patrons unable to spend money on entertainment.
2. Increased Competition: New casinos emerged, offering more attractive facilities and gaming options, drawing away the loyal customer base.
3. Regulatory Challenges: Stricter gambling regulations imposed by the government led to operational difficulties, affecting profitability.

Every casino has its peak and its valleys, and unfortunately for the razed casino, the convergence of these factors created a perfect storm, driving it to shut down its operations.

The Aftermath and the Community

Once the razed casino closed its doors, the impact rippled throughout the community. Staff members lost their jobs, and the vibrant atmosphere began to fade. Yet, amidst the despair, the local community rallied to preserve a memory in the space where joy once thrived.

The following changes were witnessed in the aftermath:

• Community initiatives to repurpose the casino space.
• The establishment of support programs for displaced casino employees.
• The rise of local businesses striving to fill the void left by the lavish establishment.

Interestingly, discussions about the razed casino Australia soon transformed into plans for development, showcasing resilience and adaptability in the face of adversity.

The Future of Gaming in Australia

The story of the razed casino serves as a cautionary tale and a blueprint for the future of gaming establishments in Australia. As the landscape continues to evolve, there are several insights to consider:

• Diversification: razed casino Future casinos must offer varied entertainment options beyond traditional gaming to capture a wide audience.
• Community Engagement: Successful establishments will need to partner with the local community, ensuring to give back as much as they receive.
• Sustainability: Emphasis on eco-friendly practices will be critical in resonating with modern consumers.

In conclusion, the razed casino may have ultimately met an untimely end, but its legacy offers valuable lessons for current and future gaming ventures in Australia.

FAQs

What ultimately caused the closure of the razed casino?

The closure was attributed to a combination of economic downturn, increased competition, and regulatory challenges.

What happened to the employees after the casino closed?

Many employees participated in community initiatives aimed at finding new employment opportunities and receiving support during the transition.

Will a new casino open in the same location?

While there are discussions about repurposing the space, any future developments will heavily depend on community input and sustainable practices.

What can future casinos learn from the razed casino’s experience?

Diversification, community engagement, and sustainability will be key pillars in successfully launching new gaming establishments.

IT purchasers must brace themselves for potential price hikes on new equipment as memory price increases percolate across supply chains. That’s a double-whammy cost crisis, of course, as they must also get set for energy price increases as demand rises to serve electricity-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) farms. 

AI also means that even Apple is increasing the amount of memory it puts inside its devices, which is noteworthy. The company has long avoided installing sizable quantities of RAM in its products, preferring to focus on device/software/OS integration and its proprietary unified memory system to deliver performance and efficiency.

What Apple does, others usually follow

The fact that Apple has had to increase RAM capacity in response to the demands of AI is significant because it means PC vendors across the board will need to do so, too. It also means people purchasing PCs will need to ensure that the systems they buy have sufficient memory installed to run AI, as any additional memory needs will add to the overall purchase price.

They’ll also have to account for the additional running cost of increased memory in the computers they deploy. That cost might seem negligible to a lone user, but at a scale of thousands of seats, the cumulative consumption could challenge company sustainability targets, as well as raising energy bills. Those costs scale. 

Apple’s answer to this is to continue to show that its systems deliver more performance per watt than its competitors. In context, you can also arguably point out that any additional memory it might pack into its products is still relatively parsimonious in comparison to competitors. That’s because its systems are inherently capable of doing more with less, which means you need less to do more. That’s a tautology, but an important one to anyone controlling a budget.

Does this matter? 

It looks as if it does. Samsung has signalled a 60% price increase for some kinds of memory, while the prices of high-bandwidth memory modules, such as the DDR used in most decent computers, including Macs, is also moving higher. 

These price increases reflect demand, as AI infrastructure is a greedy, greedy beast and continues to demand more memory, more water, more energy, and more investment capital as the bubble around AI infrastructure rapidly inflates ahead of aninevitable collapse. The result? There isn’t enough memory to go around.

Has it hit hardware prices yet? That’s not yet clear, but some (particularly in the US) are reportedly more exposed to market fluctuation than others. For example, Morgan Stanley recently downgraded most PC stocks to reflect the volatile pricing environment, warning that Dell, HP, Acer, and Asustek might be the most vulnerable to them. 

The analysts did not see Apple as under threat, in part because it is able to pre-order components at scale.

That protection won’t last forever — stockpiles get used up; but it is significant for many enterprise purchasers who must see that even as hundreds of millions of actively used PCs can’t be upgraded to Windows 11, the cost of their replacements continues to rise, and might go higher as additional AI running costs (including added on-device memory demands) come into play. 

Curse or opportunity

I think Apple can continue to argue that its once high-cost machines are becoming more and more affordable all the time, both in terms of bang for the buck, and also in terms of the total cost of ownership over time. The company’s computational performance story matters a great deal in this challenging environment, as does its ability to generate more processing power per watt than others. 

As price and tech pressures hit purchasing decisions, Apple’s long held decision to optimize its hardware seems to be delivering a bigger advantage than ever. That advantage is only made more buoyant by Apple Silicon’s built-in power, performance, and support for on-device AI.

Other things still matter

Plus, of course, even if the AI bubble does burst and a pitchfork-wielding population marches on the AI data centers, Apple also makes the best and most secure computers with the most popular operating systems, which is why employees choose its solutions when given the chance.

Those things that mattered so much before ChatGPT arrived still matter just as much today, even for IT purchasing.

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Source:: Computer World

Microsoft Ignite 2025  runs November 18-21, 2025, in San Francisco, with an optional pre-day on November 17. Can’t make it to the Moscone Center in San Francisco? No problem. It’s a hybrid event, and you can register to attend Ignite (for free) virtually here.

You can expect to learn more about AI, cloud computing, security, productivity tools, and more.

Keynote speakers include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other Microsoft leaders, including Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud + AI Group and Charlie Bell, executive vice president of Microsoft Security.

Here are highlights from the show. Remember to check this page often for more on Microsoft Ignite 2025.

Microsoft Ignite 2025 news and insights

Azure HorizonDB: Microsoft goes big with PostgreSQL

November 20, 2025: This week at Ignite 2025, Microsoft announced the latest member of its PostgreSQL family: Azure HorizonDB. Designed to be a scale-out, high-performance database, it’s intended to be a place for a new generation of PostgreSQL workloads.

Microsoft now lets customers run agents on Windows 365 cloud PCs

November 20, 2025: Microsoft has unveiled a new type of Windows 365 cloud PC that provides a secure environment for running “computer use” AI agents. Windows 365 for Agents, announced at the company’s Ignite conference this week, is built on the same foundations as existing W365 products, but “optimized” for agentic workloads. 

Cobalt 200: Microsoft’s next-gen Arm CPU targets lower TCO for cloud workloads

November 20, 2025: Microsoft unveiled the next generation of its Arm-based custom CPUs in the form of Cobalt 200 as part of its ongoing efforts to reduce dependency on x86-based instances and make its data centers more energy-efficient while offering better performance for cloud computing workloads.

Microsoft rolls out Agent 365 ‘control plane’ for AI agents

November 19, 2025: Microsoft Agent 365 is a control plane to help organizations deploy and manage AI agents at scale. Agent 365 is available through Microsoft’s Frontier program for early access to AI technologies. Agent 365 is designed to let users manage an organization’s agents at scale, regardless of where these agents are built or acquired. 

Microsoft Fabric IQ adds ‘semantic intelligence’ layer to Fabric

November 19, 2025: Microsoft says Fabric IQ’s ontology will help workers and autonomous agents better understand data in order to make decisions, but analysts fear deployment hurdles and vendor lock-in.

Microsoft touts scalability of its new PostgreSQL-compatible managed database

November 19, 2025: Third time’s the charm? At Ignite 2025, Microsoft is hoping that the scalability of its new Azure HorizonDB will lure new customers where its two existing PostgreSQL-compatible database offerings did not.

Microsoft unveils Agent 365 to help IT manage AI ‘agent sprawl’

November 18, 2025: As businesses begin deploying AI agents in greater numbers, IT teams will need to manage and secure those AI systems as they connect to corporate data. That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s Agent 365 (A365), a new “control plane” that lets customers deploy and govern the use of agents, announced at Ignite 2025.

Microsoft bets on agentic AI for cloud ops, but analysts doubt the pitch

November 18, 2025: Microsoft is betting big on agentic AI to simplify and automate cloud operations and introduced at its annual Ignite conference an agentic mode to Azure Copilot that could surface insights and provide recommendations, but not take any actions.

A look back at Microsoft Ignite 2024 news and insights

Microsoft upgrades Copilot Studio agent builder tools

Nov. 20, 2024: Microsoft unveiled new Copilot Studio features aimed at both expanding the functionality of AI agents created with the application and improving the accuracy of outputs. Customers will be able to connect Copilot Studio agents to third-party apps, and tools for building autonomous agents are now available in a public preview.

Microsoft partners with industry leaders to offer vertical SLMs

Nov. 20, 2024: Teaming up with industry partners such as Bayer and Rockwell Automation, Microsoft is adding pre-trained small language models to its Azure AI catalog aimed at highly specialized use cases.

Microsoft brings automated ‘agents’ to M365 Copilot

Nov. 19, 2024: Microsoft has introduced a new tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate repetitive tasks, part of a drive to make the genAI assistant more useful to users. Copilot Actions features a simple trigger-and-action interface that Microsoft hopes will make the workflow automations accessible to a wide range of workers. 

Microsoft extends Entra ID to WSL, WinGet

Nov. 19, 2024: Microsoft has added new security features to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and the Windows Package Manager (WinGet), including integration with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Active Directory) for identity-based access control. The goal is to enable IT admins to more effectively manage the deployment and use of these tools in enterprises.

Microsoft looks to genAI, exposure managment, and new bug bounties to secure enterprise IT

Nov. 19, 2024: Microsoft announced a host of new security measures at its annual Ignite conference, with the goal of strengthening its existing data protection, endpoint security, and extended threat detection and response capabilities. Notable improvements include the introduction of a dedicated exposure management tool, an upgrade to insider risk management (IRM) tailored to GenAI usage, new data loss prevention (DLP) features, and integration of genAI into security operations center (SOC) processes.

Microsoft and Atom Computing claim breakthrough in reliable quantum computing

Nov. 19, 2024: The companies have announced what they claim is a significant step forward in reliable quantum computing, unveiling a commercial quantum machine built with 24 entangled logical qubits. The system, achieved through a combination of Atom Computing’s neutral-atom hardware and Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization technology, aims to address the critical challenge of error detection and correction in quantum computation.

Microsoft adds major upgrades to Power Apps at Ignite

Nov. 19, 2024: The company announced a series of low-code product enhancements, targeted at developers, that ranged from new agent-building capabilities in Power Apps and Power Pages to new AI and governance features in the codeless automation tool Microsoft Power Automate.

Microsoft’s Windows 365 Link is a thin client device for shared workspaces

Nov. 19, 2024: Microsoft will start selling a thin client device that lets workers boot directly to Windows 365 “in seconds,” the company announced on Tuesday.

Microsoft reimagines Fabric with focus on AI

Nov. 19, 2024: The company announced a slate of enhancements to its data analytics platform, including Fabric Databases, which can provision auto-optimizing and auto-scaling AI databases in seconds.

Microsoft rebrands Azure AI Studio to Azure AI Foundry

Nov. 19, 2024: The toolkit for building generative AI applications has been packaged with new updates to form the Azure AI Foundry service.

From MFA mandates to locked-down devices, Microsoft posts a year of SFI milestones at Ignite

Nov. 19, 2024: The company shared a progress report on its Secure Future Initiative (SFI), introduced a year ago, which included significant measures such as enforcing multifactor authentication (MFA) by default for new tenants, isolating close to 100,000 work devices under conditional access policies, and blocking GitHub secrets from exposure.

Previous Microsoft Ignite coverage

Microsoft to launch autonomous AI at Ignite

Oct. 21, 2024: Microsoft will let customers build autonomous AI agents that can be configured to perform complex tasks with little or no input from humans. Microsoft announced that tools to build AI agents in Copilot Studio will be available in a public beta that begins at Ignite on Nov. 19, with pre-built agents rolling out to Dynamics 365 apps in the coming months.

Microsoft Ignite 2023: 11 takeaways for CIOs

Nov. 15, 2023: Microsoft’s 2023 Ignite conference might as well be called AIgnite, with over half of the almost 600 sessions featuring AI in some shape or form. Generative AI (genAI), in particular, is at the heart of many of the product announcements Microsoft is making at the event, including new AI capabilities for wrangling large language models (LLMs) in Azure, new additions to the Copilot range of genAI assistants, new hardware, and a new tool to help developers deploy small language models (SLMs) too.

Microsoft partners with Nvidia, Synopsys for genAI services

Nov. 16, 2023: Microsoft has announced that it is partnering with chipmaker Nvidia and chip-designing software provider Synopsys to provide enterprises with foundry services and a new chip-design assistant. The foundry services from Nvidia will be deployed on Microsoft Azure and will combine three of Nvidia’s elements — its foundation models, its NeMo framework, and Nvidia’s DGX Cloud service.

As Microsoft embraces AI, it says sayonara to the metaverse

Feb. 23, 2023: It wasn’t just Mark Zuckerberg who led the metaverse charge by changing Facebook’s name to Meta. Microsoft hyped it as well, notably when CEO Satya Nadella said, “I can’t overstate how much of a breakthrough this is,” in his keynote speech at Microsoft Ignite in 2021. Now, tech companies are much wiser, they tell us. It’s AI at heart of the coming transformation. The metaverse may be yesterday’s news, but it’s not yet dead.

Microsoft Ignite in the rear-view mirror: What we learned

Oct. 17, 2022: Microsoft treated its big Ignite event as more of a marketing presentation than a full-fledged conference, offering up a variety of announcements that affect Windows users, as well as large enterprises and their networks. (The show was a hybrid affair, with a small in-person option and online access for those unable to travel.)

Related  Microsoft coverage

Microsoft’s AI research VP joins OpenAI amid fight for top AI talent

Oct. 15, 2024: Microsoft’s former vice president of genAI research, Sebastien Bubeck, left the company to join OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Bubeck, a 10-year veteran at Microsoft, played a significant role in driving the company’s genAI strategy with a focus on designing more efficient small language models (SLMs) to rival OpenAI’s GPT systems.

Microsoft brings Copilot AI tools to OneDrive

Oct. 9, 2024: Microsoft’s Copilot is now available in OneDrive, part of a wider revamp of the company’s cloud storage platform.  Copilot can now summarize one or more files in OneDrive without needing to open them first; compare the content of selected files across different formats (including Word, PowerPoint, and PDFs); and respond to questions about the contents of files via the chat interface. 

Microsoft wants Copilot to be your new AI best friend

Oct. 9, 2024: Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot underwent a transformation last week, morphing into a simplified pastel-toned experience that encourages you…to just chat. “Hey Chris, how’s the human world today?” That’s what I heard after I fired up the Copilot app on Windows 11 and clicked the microphone button, complete with a calming wavey background. Yes, this is the type of banter you get with the new Copilot.

Source:: Computer World

Microsoft will reduce the price of Microsoft 365 Copilot for small and mid-sized firms beginning next month.

As of Dec. 1, 2025, Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business will cost $21 per user, per month for customers with any Microsoft 365 Business plan. That’s down from the current $30 price per month set when the tool debuted in 2023.

The new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business subscription will be available to organizations with 300 or fewer employees and includes the same features as before. This means access to the AI assistant in apps such as Excel, Teams, and Outlook, as well as Copilot agents and tools such as Notebooks. 

“We heard from smaller companies that they wanted a version that would fit their needs and budgets, too,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a blog post Tuesday. “So we’re making that happen.”

The announcement came during the company’s annual Microsoft Ignite conference this week in San Francisco.

It’s not clear whether existing customers will be automatically moved to the lower-cost plan; Computerworld asked Microsoft, but did not immediately receive a response.

Despite strong interest among IT leaders in M365 Copilot, uptake remains at an early stage. Most customers are still in pilot projects or have deployed the tool to a small subset of employees as they grapple with challenges around data governance, user adoption, and uncertain value. The lower price could ease some of those concerns for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs).

The introduction of M365 Copilot Business expands the range of options for accessing Microsoft’s AI assistant. Alongside the two main M365 Copilot subscriptions, businesses can subscribe to Teams Premium ($10 per user/month), which includes “intelligent recap” and other collaboration-focused AI features such as automated notetaking and live translation.

Then there’s Copilot Chat, available at no extra cost to Microsoft 365 customers.  Essentially a lite version of M365 Copilot, it features a chat interface (grounded in web data rather than a customer’s own files), limited management controls, and pay as you go access to agents. 

In September, Microsoft announced that Copilot Chat will be available inside Office apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This will let users to ask the AI assistant for help drafting documents or analyzing spreadsheets, for instance.  

At Ignite, Microsoft also announced an enhancement to the Copilot Chat integration with Outlook that will be “content-aware” across an entire Outlook inbox, calendar, and meetings, not just individual email threads. It is slated to be available in preview in March 2026. 

Agent Mode in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents — announced for paid M365 Copilot users in September — will enable content creation directly from the Copilot Chat interface. The AI assistant asks clarifying questions before producing a draft that users can direct it to iterate on or jump to the app to work on it themselves.

Agent Mode in Copilot Chat will also be available in “early 2026.”

More Microsoft Ignite 2025 news:

Microsoft Fabric IQ adds ‘semantic intelligence’ layer to Fabric

Microsoft unveils Agent 365 to help IT manage AI ‘agent sprawl’

Microsoft touts scalability of its new PostgreSQL-compatible managed database

Microsoft unveils Agent 365 to help IT manage AI ‘agent sprawl’

Microsoft bets on agentic AI for cloud ops, but analysts doubt the pitch

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak ASUS has announced an updated line of ExpertCenter PCs, which are designed to make office work…
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As businesses begin deploying AI agents in greater numbers, IT teams will need to manage and secure those AI systems as they connect to corporate data. That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s Agent 365 (A365), a new “control plane” that lets customers deploy and govern the use of agents. The A365 announcement was made in conjunction with the company’s Microsoft Ignite event in San Francisco.

“While we’re not quite there yet, agent sprawl will become a key issue in the near future” with agents produced for specific tasks and employees creating their own, said Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. “Microsoft wants to control the agents within their infrastructure, much as it does with other Microsoft 365 and Office 365 environments.”

A365 functions as the central record of agents that access data in an organization’s Microsoft 365 environment. That includes agents built with Microsoft’s own tools, such as Copilot Studio, as well as open-source frameworks and third-party agents from the likes of Adobe, n8n, ServiceNow, and Workday.

Accessed via the Microsoft 365 admin console, A365 allows IT staffers to manage which agents employees can use and restrict the data and resources available to those agents.

“IT leaders can track every agent being used, built, or brought into the organization, eliminating blind spots and reducing risk,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft president, Business Apps and Agents, said in a blog post Tuesday.

A visual dashboard displays connections between agents, data and workers, with real-time analytics around agent behavior and performance. 

“Even though it is early days…, there are quickly becoming too many agents to manage manually,” said Allie Mellen, an analyst at Forrester. A tool such as A365 can help IT and security teams “track, manage, and secure the agents in their organization,” she said. “AI agents are a new attack surface that we must protect given their access to sensitive data.”

A365 builds on three existing Microsoft tools: Defender, Entra, and Purview. Microsoft Defender helps detect and block known and emerging threats that target agents, while Purview, Microsoft’s data governance tool, is used to prevent agents from accessing — and then leaking — sensitive data.

Each agent is assigned a unique Microsoft Entra ID for IT to track usage and apply “adaptive, risk-based policies,” that can shut down compromised agents. “Microsoft has correctly identified that if agents are to do real work, they need ’employee’ IDs, not just software licenses,” said Alastair Woolcock, vice president analyst at Gartner. 

The use of A365 to extend Entra and Defender to the digital workforce means Microsoft is effectively “hiring agents into the org chart,” he said.  

It’s a move that forces other tech firms to either integrate with Microsoft’s governance layer or risk having their agents blocked as shadow IT, said Woolcock. “It’s a smart approach as companies and governments will need a control plane for multi-agent orchestration, where it’s not just Microsoft’s agents, but all agents under Agent 365,” he said. 

Several software vendors, including ServiceNow, Google, and Amazon Web Services are all vying to offer the main tool organizations use to govern agents. “Organizations won’t want to govern agents via a multitude of control planes and vendors; they’ll need one as a global standard,” said Woolcock. 

Microsoft’s proximity to end user workflows with Office apps and Teams gives the company a unique leverage point, he said. And if it integrates seamlessly with existing Microsoft tools, A365 could spare enterprise IT teams from relying on additional systems to manage agents.

There are still questions about how the tool will function in practice. “If I obtain agents that are not Microsoft-created, will I still be able to insert my third-party agents into this new infrastructure?” said Gold. “Microsoft says yes, but we’ll need to see how that plays out, much as it took some time to play out with PC and cloud apps. But overall, this is a win-win situation for both MSFT and its customers.”

Agent 365 is available now in early access via Microsoft’s Frontier program. Microsoft plans to offer more details on pricing closer to general availability.

Source:: Computer World

For the third time in recent months, Google has found itself scrambling to fix a potentially serious zero-day flaw in the Chrome browser’s V8 JavaScript engine.

Addressed on Monday as part of an emergency ‘out-of-band’ patch, the vulnerability identified as CVE-2025-13223 was discovered by Clément Lecigne of Google’s in-house Threat Analysis Group (TAG).

At some point, the company also uncovered evidence that the flaw, rated ‘high’ with a CVSS score of 8.8, was being exploited in the wild.

As is customary to avoid giving other threat groups clues, Google’s advisory offers no detail on this discovery, merely stating: “Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2025-13223 exists in the wild.”

Type confusion

The vulnerability description is just as sparse, mentioning only that the vulnerability is a Type Confusion flaw affecting the V8 JavaScript engine. This is a core element not only of Chrome, but also other Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Opera.

The latter point is significant given that Chromium browsers are by some distance the most widely used consumer and business browsers in the world. Not surprisingly, Google added the following boilerplate statement to its latest advisory:

“Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third-party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.”

In the case of third-party apps, that could take some time. In short, don’t hold your breath if you’re expecting a more detailed explanation of CVE-2025-13223.

The V8 engine was introduced by Google in 2008 to speed up JavaScript, a C++ scripting technology fundamental to modern web technology. Type Confusion is a class of vulnerability that in this type of C-coded component can cause memory corruption, out-of-bounds access, and in the worst-case scenario, code execution.

This raises the possibility that CVE-2025-13223 can be exploited without user interaction by luring a user to a booby-trapped website. Google’s advisory doesn’t say, while the National Vulnerability (NVD) entry says only: “Type Confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 142.0.7444.175 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page.” However, given that many V8 engine vulnerabilities make this kind of exploit possible, security administrators should assume it is a risk and patch Chrome as a priority.

Enterprise updating

The latest update also addresses a separate Type Confusion vulnerability in the V8 engine, CVE-2025-13224, also rated as ‘high’ priority. So far, there is no indication that this is under exploit.

Enterprise customers can address both flaws by updating to Chrome version 142.0.7444.175/.176 for Windows, version 142.0.7444.176 for Mac, and version 142.0.7444.175 for Linux.

Normally, enterprises patch every eight weeks on the Extended Stable Channel (ESC), allowing plenty of time for testing. In contrast, patches for zero-day vulnerabilities will usually be applied manually within days.

“For enterprise admins, the toll is real, because zero days mean a sweaty scramble to get fast patching and testing. And because Chrome updates come without real warning, hard and often, teams don’t get a break,” commented Zbyněk Sopuch, CTO of risk management company Safetica.

“The pattern here is that shared components multiply the blast radius, and until the wider community patches in an organized way, V8 stays one of the ripest targets in the room,” he added.

Attackers are always looking for ways to target V8, he said, because it allows them to “aim at the entire beehive. Admins are lying awake at night because of Chrome and the unknown list of apps that quietly run the same engine.”

Chrome has suffered two other confirmed zero days in the V8 engine in 2025, from a tally of seven across Chrome as a whole. The V8 flaws were CVE-2025-5419 in June and CVE-2025-10585 in September. Seven zero days sounds like a lot, but the annual count has been around this level for some time.

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak vivo has confirmed that its new X300 and X300 Pro smartphones are set to launch in…
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Source:: Fossbytes

Nvidia hopes that its new open-source AI model for physics, Apollo, will find application in a wide variety of high-tech scientific and industrial fields.

It unveiled the new model family at SC25, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, just a month after unveiling four others: Nemotron for agentic AI, Clara for biomedical AI, Isaac GR00T for robotics, and Cosmos for other physical AI applications.

Nvidia said that the Apollo family of models will allow developers to integrate real time capabilities into their simulation software in areas such as defect detection, computational lithography, and electrothermal and mechanic design for electronic devices and semiconductors, structural analysis, weather forecasting and simulation, computational fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, and simulation in nuclear fusion, plasma simulation, and fluid structure interaction.

Apollo will provide pretrained checkpoints and reference workflows for training, inference and benchmarking, allowing developers to customize them for their applications. It is, said Nvidia, “coming soon,” and will be available on HuggingFace, build.nvidia.com, and as Nvidia NIM microservices.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of Greyhound Research, said that Apollo stands out as the intellectual centerpiece of SC25. “Nvidia has turned AI-driven physics into a fully industrialized model family spanning semiconductors, structural mechanics, materials science, weather, climate, automotive aerodynamics, and more. These are not research curiosities. When tsunami forecasting models run billions of times faster, or when petabytes of materials data are folded into real-time inferences, the scientific method itself shifts. Apollo ensures that this shift occurs inside Nvidia’s ecosystem. Once engineers, climate researchers, and materials scientists base their workflows on these models, the surrounding software, hardware, and infrastructure decisions become inevitably Nvidia-aligned. This is the most powerful form of lock-in: dependency created through genuine breakthrough performance.”

Yet more Nvidia supercomputers

Some of those models could perhaps be put to use in new supercomputers being built with Nvidia chips.

Japanese research institute RIKEN is building two of them, one providing AI for scientific research, and the second dedicated to research in quantum algorithms, hybrid simulation and quantum-classical computing methods. Both use the GB200 NVL4 platform and are interconnected by NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking.

Dion Harris, senior director, HPC and AI infrastructure solutions at Nvidia, said the second system will integrate GPUs directly into RIKEN’s quantum HBC hybrid infrastructure, linking quantum computers with accelerated computing systems and classical supercomputers like Fugaku.

In the US, Dell and the Texas Advanced Computing Center are announcing the 300 petaflop Horizon supercomputer, which will, Nvidia said, be “America’s largest academic supercomputer.“ Due to come online in 2026, it will contain 4,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs and 9,500 Nvidia Vera CPUs.

Lock-step launches lead to lock-in

However, Gogia expressed concerns over the plethora of new Nvidia-based supercomputers — more than 80 announced this year alone. “This is not market success; it is architectural dependence,” he said. “National science agencies are aligning their multi-year roadmaps with Nvidia’s cadence, effectively transitioning from vendor selection to vendor reliance.”

Overall, he was impressed with Nvidia’s featured technologies, although he worries about the future as its dominance continues to increase.

“The breakthroughs showcased at SC25 are extraordinary,” Gogia said, but, “They come with a governance cost. When the entire lifecycle of scientific computation, spanning simulation, AI, data movement, networking, storage, orchestration, and quantum control, becomes anchored to a single vendor’s architecture, autonomy diminishes. CIOs, national labs, and research agencies must now decide whether they are comfortable with a future where the acceleration of science is extraordinary, but the ecosystem shaping it is extraordinarily narrow. Nvidia has offered the world a path to unprecedented capability. It is up to the world to decide whether that path should also be the only one.”

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak Valve has officially announced the Steam Machine, a new portable gaming PC designed to bring Steam’s…
The post Steam Machine by Valve: Specs, Release Date & Expected Price appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

AI shopping assistants, rather than elves, may be the ones bustling behind the scenes this holiday season.

At least, Google seems to be pushing in that direction: The tech giant has released a “major AI shopping update” in Gemini that can trigger AI agents to call stores, actively track pricing, and even purchase items on their own.

This signals a new shopping paradigm, but it may also tax enterprise systems and practices.

“Google’s update moves retail closer to intent-based shopping, where the experience feels less like hunting and more like being guided to the right answer,” noted Julie Geller, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.

Shoppers can even have AI agents call stores

As a natural extension of its AI-powered capabilities, Google’s AI Mode can now process shopping questions in native language. That is, shoppers can describe what they’re looking for and receive an “intelligently organized response,” with images, pricing, reviews, and inventory info.

Responses are tailored and formatted to respond to user questions and needs, Google explains. For instance, a shopper looking for “cozy sweaters for happy hour in warm autumn colors” will receive a list of shoppable images; another on the fence about moisturizers, meanwhile, may get a table with side-by-side comparisons based on product reviews.

“Buyers will be able to get very personal recommendations, and aggregate vendors much like they do with Google already,” noted Jason Andersen, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Going a step further, users can now shop right inside Gemini and, when searching for products “near me” in AI mode, can access a “let Google call” button. As they browse, Gemini will prompt them for more specifics, and on the backend, call nearby stores to determine availability, price, and information on any special promos. The shopper will then receive an email or text with inventory information on Google’s aggregate Shopping Graph. This features 50 billion product listings, two billion of which are updated every hour, according to Google.

These capabilities are currently only available to US-based users. Google’s Duplex technology underpins these new features, along with a “big Gemini model upgrade” to help the AI identify the best stores to call, suggest follow-up questions, and summarize key conversation takeaways. “Let Google call” rolled out in search this week in the US, in categories including toys, health and beauty, and electronics.

Rounding out the shopping experience, Google is now supporting full-on agentic checkouts. Shoppers can keep tabs on certain items via a price-tracking feature — size, color, amount they want to spend — and will receive a notification when the product comes into their price range.

Then, at least with some eligible merchants, shoppers can opt to have Google purchase the item via Google Pay. Google is rolling out the capability initially with a number of US merchants, including Wayfair, Chewy, Quince, and some Shopify retailers.

Google emphasizes that AI will always ask for permission before buying anything, and will only pay after a human approves the price and shipping details.

It says these new features are “giving merchants a new way to drive foot traffic,” while also freeing up shoppers’ time.

Enterprises should rethink infrastructure

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen agents integrated into the shopping experience; Walmart, Saks Fifth Avenue, Amazon, and others have been experimenting with AI-powered shopping capabilities.

However AI agents manifest, though, experts urge enterprises to rethink their infrastructure.

Google’s new agentic shopping features can strain enterprise e-commerce systems by “collapsing the discovery and checkout journey into a rapid chain of machine actions that all hit at once,” noted Info-Tech’s Geller.

What used to unfold step by step now fires almost simultaneously. When an agent checks pricing, inventory, reviews, and delivery options in a few seconds, any messy data or slow decision point shows up immediately, she pointed out.

“Most enterprise systems were built around human browsing patterns, so this creates pressure on the parts of the stack that aren’t clean or are loosely connected,” said Geller.

The real work for enterprises is making sure the core pieces “don’t trip over one another,” she said. This requires consistent product data, category structures that make sense, and decision systems that can operate “without pulling everything else down with them.”

“Guardrails around how quickly an agent can hit different endpoints matter too, because the traffic no longer looks anything like traditional browsing,” said Geller.

Operators should keep an eye out for unusual patterns and step in early. One session triggering a sudden cluster of requests, or disagreement among availability and delivery systems are signs that the system is “being pushed in ways it wasn’t designed for,” said Geller.

However, there is a positive side, she noted: Pressure from AI agents forces companies to clean up the fundamentals, and shoppers will “feel that right away.”

“Information is clearer, options feel more aligned, and the small contradictions that usually frustrate people start to fall away,” said Geller.

There has been some “nice uptake” of these types of agentic features for standalone e-commerce, such as Amazon’s Rufus, noted Moor’s Andersen. “But Google takes it across many sites,” he said.

Google is abstracting the agent from the e-commerce site into a graph, which shouldn’t (at least in theory) impact site performance or scale. But Andersen questioned how often the graph will update and whether it could potentially create new or different pricing incentives.

For example, will Google share with sellers (or their competition) that a certain number of customers have asked to be flagged when their item drops from $120 to $99 MSRP? “That would be incredibly valuable information,” said Andersen.

Further, seller behavior could change based on Google’s graph updates, resulting in more or fewer flash sales. It also creates challenges for distribution models.

“If I have several certified sellers, will there be a race to the bottom on my product, where an agent can pit different routes to market against each other,” Andersen questioned, “and how will Google prioritize the sellers?”

At this early stage, it’s difficult to know whether vendors will have the ability to opt out of the shopping graph, or if adoption will be slow enough so they can adapt as this new buying paradigm develops, Andersen noted.

Overall, he said, “this looks great for buyers, but for sellers, it could potentially be very disruptive.”

Source:: Computer World

The laptop you use tomorrow will be like a Mac: Beautifully-designed, easy-to-use, highly secure, and packed with enough power to run artificial intelligence (AI) on device. 

It will possess advanced memory handling to optimize the use of that precious component, rather than squandering cash, heat sinks, and internal real estate on RAM that doesn’t usually get used. Designed to optimize the OS it runs, it will integrate with your mobile devices, have a built-in tracker in case of loss, and will retain the best possible value on second-user markets.

Professionals will use these machines to replace desktops in countless scenarios, boosted by on-device AI capabilities — or at least, highly private and sovereign cloud-based AI services. In a world of energy scarcity, the power efficient chip in the device in your hands will be worth three in the cloud, while computing models will evolve to be small enough to work on devices at the edge most of the time.

What you’ve got

You don’t need to wait for this future; with Apple’s all-new 14-in. MacBook Pro with an M5 processor, tomorrow’s already here.

It’s a computer that ticks each one of those boxes, with the kind of best-in-class, industry-leading power and performance required to make it a capable productivity partner for years to come. In that sense, it’s much like the M5 iPad Pro I recently reviewed.

As for the specifications, I’ve been using a stylish, Apple-provided Space Black 14-in. MacBook Pro. The mid-range model ships with 1TB SSD storage, costs $1,799 and carries the powerful 10-core CPU/10-core GPU M5 processor, equipped with 16GB Unified Memory. Apple got it back, but I still have my memories.

Which begs the question, how powerful is this chip? Stopping briefly from making pictures of family members riding unicorns in DrawThings AI, I reached for my Apple ID and installed a handful of the usual tests.

Making sure to check the OS was up to date on my test model and sadly switching off the rather thrilling game I’d managed to disappear into, I set them running (one at a time). These are the results I gained on the test machine. (They seem to be in the same range as data found online.)

GeekBench 6

Single-core: 4,250

Multi-core: 17,819

OpenCL: 48,470.

CineBench

CPU: Single-Core: 2,464. Multicore: 15,745

MP ratio: 6..39

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

Write: 6,500.4 MB/s

Read: 6,774.3 MB/s

Apple

What do the numbers mean?

Given test results really only mean something to a relatively small number of folks, let me paraphrase the significance of these data points.

The Geekbench score means these Macs are among the top three computers in the world when it comes to processor intensive operations (the others are energy-devouring desktops you can’t pop under your arm). The score also means the M5 MacBook Pros should turn out to be the fastest Macs you’ve ever browsed the web with, as apps such as browsers, email, and all the other things you use each day tend to rely on single-core processes — and the MacBook Pro is the fastest single-core notebook you’ll find on Geekbench right now.

That means you’ll experience a noticeable difference doing the things you do every day, while also having the power to handle complex operations you might need to tackle less often.

The CineBench data is also good news. It means that if your business involves rendering images, applying complex 3D transitions, or even data modelling, these machines will crunch right through those tasks. Finally, the Blackmagic test reassures us that even when handling really large chunks of data, such as video or RAW images, you’ll have little lag while those huge files are opened and worked with.

Everything you do, from games to 3D modeling to messing around with Genmoji will look remarkable on the now customary Liquid Retina XDR display — a display that also happens to be color-accurate enough for film and television color grading. 

Apple

These will do the business

As you might expect from a professional Mac, these machines will take anything you throw at them and come back for more. Serious pro users will take heart in this, as it bodes extraordinarily well for the more advanced (M5 Pro, M5 Ultra) processors we expect to appear in spring. 

That Macs running those chips are likely to appear means the company now has a Mac to scale across the widest possible usage scenarios, with introduction of a low-cost MacBook expected to take an even bigger chunk out of the low and mid-range PC market. 

When it comes to price, the fact you can pick up the same machine I tested for $1,799 makes these Macs an absolute steal. Yes, I know that amount isn’t peanuts, it’s a lot of money – more than I can afford on the ever-shrinking pittance I make in journalism. But if you’re a professional user doing professional tasks that require this much horsepower, the price seems plenty attractive. 

Given that the Mac consistently delivers significantly higher Geekbench test results than its PC brethren, Windows laptops with Snapdragon X Elite and Intel Core Ultra 7 200 processors can’t match these devices. Indeed, by the time PCs carrying the next-gen Snapdragon/Intel chips appear next year, Apple will answer back with an even more performant M5 Pro. Apple Silicon really is winning the processor wars, and even high-end gamers will see the benefit of the performance, power, and flexibility of these machines, with much better battery life.

And a better OS

Skip the eye candy and think about it. Apple’s OSes consistently generate the highest user satisfaction scores in the business. More secure, built with privacy inside, easy to use and much-loved by consumers (your employees), Macs are cheaper to run over time, cost less in tech support, and you can swap them for real hard currency once they reach EOL in your company.

Not only this, but you get regular software updates, annual operating system updates (free), and a thriving ecosystem to support device management, security, identity and beyond. Better yet, free training is available at most Apple retail stores.

While I agree that defining what makes an OS “better” is necessarily about individual choice, it’s hard not to see how these Macs tick the right boxes. That they will also run Windows really well in emulation mode thanks to Parallels (or various flavors of Linux) means you can legitimately go Mac while maintaining legacy integration. 

Innovation inside

If I had a cent every time some “influencer” moaned about Apple’s lack of innovation, I’d probably be only mildly better off, but it remains as untrue as it’s ever been. Guy Debord puts it this way, saying, “The fetishism of the commodity … attains its ultimate fulfilment in the spectacle.”

When it comes to Apple, it means many continue to seek innovation in relatively shallow things like shape and form, while ignoring the value of the heaps of innovation packed inside the company’s products. Think about the Macs you own now and what they can do in contrast to the iMac you perhaps once had in your home in the late 90s.

Sure, the devices aren’t in see through, multi-colored plastic any more. But just look at the rich set of features inside: the processor, the operating system, the components, the graphics support, the display innovation, more. Stop, think beyond the spectacle, and you will surely recognize that packed inside each Mac are literally hundreds and hundreds of years of human ingenuity, going all the way back to at least 1843 and the genius of Ada Lovelace — and probably back to alchemy itself.

Alchemy? What else do you call the weird magic in materials science inside every MacBook Pro? That alchemy is evidenced in that the Mac is made from 45% recycled material, including a 100% recycled aluminium enclosure and 100% recycled rare earths in the magnets, even down to 100% recycled cobalt in the battery.

While some of these materials owe debts to early chemistry, Apple’s deep investments in new manufacturing processes should be seen as just as innovative as the touch UI on the first iPhone. Even Alexander Graham Bell would be impressed making his first FaceTime call using that 12-megapixel Center Stage Camera, the built-in studio microphones, and superb six-speaker surround sound system. Put some music on and disappear into a beautifully productive audio bubble from this machine.

Buying advice

Not everyone needs one, but many people will want one anyway. Apple’s MacBook Air remains the go-to Mac for most of us, but if your work involves anything at all processor-intensive, then you’ll want to go Pro. 

If that’s you and you happen to be using an M1 or (arguably) M2 Mac, or earlier, then this is the right upgrade for you. If you are already using an M4 you can probably wait another year before you upgrade. If you’re on a Windows PC, it’s likely that after a little culture shock (mostly around the Ctrl button) you’ll be eminently satisfied with a Mac that runs Windows better than most PCs.

Would I get one? Of course I would, I’m the Appleholic. It should be clear that tomorrow’s laptops will deliver as much as this Mac — but by then, Apple will be offering something even better. Right now, I don’t think there is a laptop that’s any better than this that isn’t also made by Apple.

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

Source:: Computer World

The gist:

Salesforce will add Doti’s technology to Slack, where it can answer workers’ questions using enterprise data.

The deal will help Salesforce catch up with rivals already developing their own AI-based enterprise search tools.

Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Israeli startup, Doti, aiming to enhance AI-based enterprise search capabilities offered via Slack.

The demand for efficient data retrieval and interpretation has been growing within enterprises, driven by the need to streamline workflows and increase productivity, thereby accelerating decision-making.

The global enterprise search market is projected to reach $12.2 billion by 2032 from just $5 billion in 2022, growing at a CAGR of 9.6%, a report from Allied Market Research showed.

Slack itself has been offering an enterprise AI search capability since March to help enterprises discover information from applications and services, building on its previously released ability to search information within its platform.

Given the market opportunity, the acquisition is a no-brainer as Salesforce would want to advance its capabilities in the space, analysts pointed out, referring to Doti’s current product offering, which is a AI-based enterprise search bot that can be interfaced with on Slack to surface insights from across applications and services, such as Datadog, GitLab, Jira, Confluence, , Notion, Slack, Salesforce, Monday, and Zendesk, among others.

“Doti supports both humans and AI agents in real-time by not only retrieving but also interpreting information. That should be the real reason why Salesforce wants it. The company has been pushing towards a model where Slack becomes the primary workspace and Agentforce powers automated workflows inside it,” said Ashwin Venkatesan, executive research leader at HFS Research.

“In that vision, Doti provides Salesforce with the missing intelligence layer, transforming conversations into accurate answers and actions. In simple terms, it strengthens the bridge between chat, context, and execution, which is central to Salesforce’s agent-driven roadmap,” Venkatesan added.

Explaining further Salesforce’s rationale to acquire Doti, Venkatesan pointed out that Doti has already achieved a few complex parts needed to execute Salesforce’s vision of combining Slack and Agentforce, including building a knowledge-graph backbone, an auto-answering layer that behaves more like an assistant than a search bar, flexible deployment options, and deep, native integration with Slack.

“…getting to Doti’s level of maturity would have taken years, and proper execution would have been a key challenge. That’s why an in-house build wasn’t the practical method,” Venkatesan said.  

However, analysts pointed out that Slack, with or without Doti’s expertise, faces pressure from other vendors, including Microsoft, Google, and AWS, in the AI-based enterprise search space.

The current competitive landscape comprises three broad groups: large platform providers such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS; specialist search engines such as Coveo, Sinequa, Lucidworks, and Elastic; and assistant-layer players like Glean, which sit directly in the workflow, Venkatesan said.

Doti’s team will join Salesforce’s AI R&D hub in Israel post the acquisition, which is expected to close by January.

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak If your right AirPod is not charging or refuses to play any sound, you’re not alone….
The post How To Fix Your Right AirPod Not Charging? appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Deepti Pathak Choosing the right laptop for work is not that easy. You need something fast, something reliable,…
The post The 5 Best Business Laptops Built for Work In 2025 appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

In a reality attack destined no doubt to be completely ignored by ideologically deluded regulators and cash-hungry competitors, Apple has published an extensive report that proves the anticipated benefits of lower App Store commissions are not reaching European consumers at all. 

Not only that, but even the developers who do benefit from this ham-fisted attempt at market liberalization aren’t based in Europe.

Are you really surprised? 

After all, the initial implantation of these laws is based on theory, rather than practice. It is, surely, obvious that under free market theory, people will sell goods and services for as much as the market can sustain.

That means that making it cheaper to sell those goods (by App Store changes) will not automatically translate into any wider consumer benefit. But it is more likely to turn into yet more profit for those with goods on sale.

In that respect, there can be no tangible consumer benefits from App Store liberalization, so long as prices charged at that store reflect market demand. All that’s really happening is a different split in profit share. 

Who cares?

The problem is that consumers are directly harmed by the way in which this new fiscal carve up is created. That’s because they are forced to accept heightened security and privacy risks as store fronts multiply — even as regulation over the privacy and security of those stores remains relatively weak. 

Plus, in the case of App Stores, this also means device vendors (Apple, in particular) end up being forced to provide tech support for people who have problems installing apps from third-party operations.  Sure, Apple might not have a legal responsibility to sort these problems out, but it is a company with relatively ethical values and will no doubt spend time trying to help its customers. That’s a cadre of free tech support for those third-party app stores — profitable for them, but at the cost of higher running costs for Apple and a degraded user experience for the rest of us.

Today’s report doesn’t go into all of this, of course. But it’s hard not to see how its criticisms point to the logical conclusion that far from benefitting consumers, App Store liberalization has simply exposed them to potential fraud and other harms, inconsistent user experiences, security threats — all so a few more dollars can land in the laps of the multi-millionaires who paid so much cold hard cash to lobbyists, politicians, and PRs to complain about the so-called “Apple Tax.”

Wake up, people: These folks didn’t resent that so-called tax because you paid it; they resented it because they didn’t get to keep all of it. 

What really happens

And that’s precisely what seems to be happening, according to the Apple report. It’s important to note that this report was conducted by economics experts at Analysis Group (paid for by Apple). I won’t paraphrase the entire thing here; you can read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. What I have done is selected just three choice quotes to demonstrate the argument:

“The five top-selling developers in EU App Store storefronts in the three-month period prior to adopting the alternative business terms kept the price of their most popular product (defined as a paid app or a specific in-app purchase, such as a particular subscription or a given number of virtual coins) unchanged, even though they experienced a substantial reduction in the commission rate they paid.”

“Developers’ decision not to pass on commission savings to EU users mirrors Apple’s past experience following the launch of the Small Business Program, which reduced commission rates from 30% to 15% for tens of thousands of small developers beginning in 2021. Less than 5% of those developers’ apps exhibited any price decreases whatsoever after their commission rates decreased.”

“The findings of this study demonstrate that commission savings as a result of the DMA have not led to price decreases for customers and overwhelmingly flowed to developers outside the EU. Despite lower commission rates, developers maintained, or increased, the prices of 91% of products, accounting for 94% of transactions, and the small number of price decreases appear mostly, if not entirely, unrelated to the lower fees. In addition to developers keeping most of the commission savings for themselves, over 86% of the savings went to developers based outside of the EU.”

So, next time someone bewails the Apple tax, just look at what they do. Are they genuinely complaining about Apple’s business practices, or do they just want to take a bigger slice of the pie? Following the money (and the data) suggests the answer.

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

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai Wordle is the super fun game from the NYT, where you put your vocabulary to the…
The post Wordle Hints & Answer For Today: November 13 appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

A year after its acquisition of Cameyo, Google is making the virtual application delivery platform generally available and integrating it with Chrome Enterprise.   

Cameyo’s virtualization technology enables business to access “legacy” Windows applications —from ERP tools to AutoCAD or Excel — a major limitation for Chromebooks in the workplace. It differs from traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) tools by delivering just the individual app a user requires, Google said; the app is then accessed via the Chrome browser or as a progressive web app.

On Wednesday, Google announced that Cameyo by Google, as it’s now known, is generally available, priced at $132 per user a year.  

“Cameyo by Google helps us deliver on our vision for the future of work, one where you can access all of your applications side by side,” Rob Beard, product manager at Google, said during a briefing. It enables a “workspace where web apps and legacy applications are virtually the same, where the virtualization layer is invisible to the end users.” 

IT admins, Beard said, can “deliver apps to end users’ devices in minutes, without having to configure or even touch those end user devices.”

Google has also added an integration between Cameyo and Chrome Enterprise Premium, is browser and device management tool. This will ease the “deployment and management” of virtual apps, saidBeard, with access controls available via the Google Admin Console. The integration enables additional security features around virtual apps, such as URL filtering and data loss prevention (to stopusers from copying data out of an SAP app running in Cameyo, for instance).   

Another addition is the ability for Google’s Gemini AI assistant to interact with Cameyo-basedWindows apps. Otherwise, Cameyo users shouldn’t notice much difference from the product they’ve been using already, said Beard.

Cameyo by Google could help organizations that standardize on Google’s enterprise offerings continue to use legacy Windows apps, said Tom Mainelli, IDC group vice president, device and consumer research.

“Cameyo looks great as a standalone virtualization solution, but what’s powerful about this launch is its increased integration with the broader Google enterprise suite,” he said.

The ability to access Google’s Gemini AI in legacy apps could prove useful for end users, he said, while the Chrome Enterprise Premium integration means customers can “layer on additional security features” to those virtual apps.

While Cameyo by Google won’t convince a fully Windows-based enterprise to move entirely to Google’s ecosystem, it can “make it easier for organizations that are curious about and experimenting with Google’s various enterprise offerings to move more users into that ecosystem,” he said.

Source:: Computer World

Western European organizations are ramping up investments in local and regional cloud providers because growing geopolitical tensions are raising concerns that access to global cloud services could be disrupted for political reasons.

A survey of 214 CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe, conducted by Gartner between May and June, found that more than 61% plan to increase their reliance on local and regional cloud providers due to geopolitics. More than half (53%) plan to restrict future use of global cloud providers for the same reason — and 44% reported they’re already limiting use.

“It shows that geopolitics absolutely have an impact on the decision making of organizations when it comes to cloud,” said Rene Buest, senior director analyst at Gartner. 

There are several reasons for an increased focus on digital sovereignty, according to Buest. 

One is a fear the US government could block access to cloud services. For instance, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, reportedly lost access to Microsoft services earlier this year, several months after US President Donald Trump placed sanctions on the organization. Microsoft has since denied it suspended services for the ICC. 

Other cases, such as Adobe cutting off Venezuelan customers in compliance with US  sanctions against that country, reinforced concerns about who has access to their data.

“Digital sovereignty has a lot to do with control — who has control over the technology or over the cloud I’m on,” said Buest. “And if I’m not able to control it, there’s the likelihood that I won’t be operational at some point anymore.”

There’s also uncertainty around trade negotiations, with many worried that tariffs could be placed on US cloud services.  

Amid geopolitical uncertainty, many European organizations are turning to alternatives to established cloud providers, and 55% plan to expand their use of open-source software, according to the Gartner survey.

Several public sector organizations in the region are moving to open source digital workplace apps. The German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft software with LibreOffice, Nextcloud, and Open-X-Change, while the city of Lyon in France, will replace Windows and Office with open-source alternatives. And the Austrian Armed Forces will reportedly deploy LibreOffice to 16,000 workstations.

Digital sovereignty is expected to grow as a priority globally, according to Gartner. By 2030, the analyst firm forecasts that more than 75% of all enterprises outside the US will have a digital sovereignty strategy that involves local or regional cloud usage. 

Heightened interest in digital sovereignty will result in increased spending on local clouds and open-source applications, but the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are unlikely to be too troubled. These hyperscalers account for 70% of the IaaS, PaaS, and hosted private cloud market in Europe, according to a report by Synergry Research Group from July. US tech giants also lead in SaaS, with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace widely used by private and public sector organizations.

Buest expects some cloud spending to shift to European providers in the coming years, boosting revenues for local suppliers. But a mass exodus of customers from global cloud providers is unlikely. 

“We won’t see a big shift, or that the hyperscalers lose an immense amount of market share,” said Buest. “It’s still a drop in the ocean.”

For CIOs and other IT leaders, his advice is to select which workloads are appropriate for a sovereign cloud and when to rely on hyperscalers — a room booking application would contain less sensitve corporate information, for instance. They should assess the current level of sovereignty and control over their data and understand the likelihood of various risk scenarios. 

“So basically, [it’s] good old risk management,” said Buest.

Source:: Computer World

By Partner Content Imagine you’re at a café or airport and you see a free Wi-Fi network. You connect…
The post How To Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi: Beginner’s Guide to Privacy and Proxies appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes