By Hisan Kidwai The NYT’s Spelling Bee is a super fun word-hunting game where you have to guess as…
The post Today’s NYT Spelling Bee Answers For August 30 appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Hisan Kidwai Wordle is the super fun game from the NYT, which challenges players to use their extensive…
The post Wordle Hints & Answers For Today: August 30 appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

Your freedom and privacy are at risk as the UK government continues its dangerous attempt to drive a great hole into data security, despite the vast weight of warnings that doing so will make all of us far less safe. 

In almost complete secrecy and without any mandate to do so, the UK has been demanding that Apple install a back door into encrypted data. We recently heard from the US that it had backed off in this attempt. 

This may not be true, warns the Financial Times, citing recent court filings from the top-secret Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) court in which Apple is opposing the UK demands. If that is indeed true, it will no doubt be seen in the US as fundamental dishonesty on the part of the current UK administration. 

Whose side are you on?

The report also confirms that the UK wanted access to much more data than we thought — far more than the information protected by the Advanced Data Protection feature that Apple withdrew from offering in the UK as it grappled with the government’s overreach. 

According to the Financial Times, the UK is demanding access to all grades of iCloud storage, and these demands extend globally: “The obligations… are not limited to the UK or users of the service in the UK; they apply globally in respect of the relevant data categories of all iCloud users,” the IPT filing states. 

This hypothetically gives British law enforcement the right to access the data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including the US. It means that UK intelligence agents will be able to get people’s data, emails, and passwords with little protection, transparency, or oversight, and that this authoritarian overreach extends to users no matter where they are from.

There has been no real public debate around any of this. 

The back door everyone is searching for

The UK is attempting to take this action against everybody’s interests in near-total secrecy, wielding a law it invented precisely to give it the power to do so. That law gives the UK Home Office the power to demand that Apple and others create dangerous back doors into encrypted data. Apple is appealing against the demand, but the case is not expected to reach court until next year. 

While that process continues, the understanding is that Apple may already have been forced to meet these demands, which basically means the UK has fired a starting pistol for an international hacker’s race to find and exploit that door. 

If Apple has been forced to take steps to comply with the law, then nation-states worldwide will be searching for that vulnerability, with highly resourced armies of hackers already searching for the UK-mandated dangerous data insecurity. It is only a matter of time until these designer vulnerabilities are identified, exploited, and abused.

The UK’s actions will also give carte blanche to other repressive regimes to make similar demands. A recent Apple transparency report confirmed the extent to which the UK embraces surveillance, showing the nation to make more data requests per head of population than nearly every other nation.

An act of digital self-harm

In tandem with the decision to force UK internet users to share their personal details with little-regulated, foreign-owned authorization companies under the so-called Online Safety Act, and the equally stupid decision to force Apple to open up key components of its operating system to third parties, it seems clear that the UK is not committed to providing a secure online environment to do business online.

But while it engages in this deluded act of digital hara-kiri, the nation is also imperiling data protection for users from every other nation by demanding dangerous back doors through data encryption that impact every nation. These back doors will make everyone less secure, to the detriment of both individual liberty and international economy.

Step by step, the UK is becoming a less attractive place to do any form of digital business, and given the extent to which the current administration seems unable to listen to criticism of its decisions, it makes sense to think the UK is deliberately working to undermine the digital economy its feeble GDP growth relies upon. The repeated pattern of digital self-harm is so extensive that it must be deliberate, as it would take an effort of will to be so belligerently stupid.

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

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak Ninja Time is unlike any Roblox game; it gets you to feel like a real ninja….
The post Ninja Time Trello & Discord Link (2025) appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Hisan Kidwai BGMI, or Battlegrounds Mobile India, is probably the most fun battle royale game, and for good…
The post BGMI Redeem Codes For August 29 appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Michael Newton As an American born and raised in New York City, I’ve seen the power of US entrepreneurialism to change the world. The ambition, ingenuity, and relentless drive that have powered the country’s economy for generations have also been a global force for prosperity, stability, and innovation. Yet now the US is retreating into an aggressive and unpredictable form of unilateral bullying. I am deeply concerned — not just for America, but for the world.  For the past few years, I’ve watched these developments from Europe. I’ve settled with my family in the Netherlands, where I work as CEO of cultivated…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Figures published by Google last week minimizing the energy and water consumption of individual queries answered by its AI services are still not giving us the full picture of AI energy use, according to an article in MIT Technology Review on Thursday. The writer went on to raise further questions about AI’s resource consumption that enterprise IT leaders will need to consider in their budget and ROI calculations. 

The article in Technology Review highlighted the elements missing from Google’s report of its AI resource consumption, a report that has already raised questions elsewhere. Those missing details make it all but impossible for enterprises to extrapolate future costs or environmental impacts.

Google’s estimate for the water and electricity consumption — five drops and a quarter of a watt-hour — of a single text query to its AI services “doesn’t reflect all queries and it leaves out cases that likely use much more energy,” such as images or videos, the article’s author Casey Crownhart wrote. Crownhart co-authored a much deeper dive into AI’s energy footprint for Technology Review in May.

And Google’s estimate is just the median value — half the text queries it handles use less energy, and half more: “We don’t know anything about how much energy these more complicated queries demand or what the distribution of the range is,” Crownhart wrote.

By choosing to publish just the consumption of a single query, Google minimized the impact of its AI. “We don’t know how many queries Gemini is seeing, so we don’t know the product’s total energy impact,” she wrote.

Rival AI operator OpenAI does share total traffic figures, saying that it sees 2.5 billion queries to ChatGPT every day, while Google has only said that Gemini has 450 million monthly active users. And that number only describes a fraction of Google’s AI impact, as it also uses the technology to provide AI summaries in web searches, and to help draft or summarize emails and texts, Crownhart noted, concluding, “So even if you’re trying to think about your own personal energy demand, it’s increasingly difficult to tally up.”

The impact for IT

But it’s not just personal: Enterprises too are paying for these AI services and, indirectly, the cost of their energy and water consumption. 

As the cost of these inputs rises, IT departments must make budget projections based on the anticipated number and nature of AI queries: Text? Video? Complex or simple analysis? If CIOs are trying to project those costs for 2026, they will have to make some difficult guesses about new capabilities and new players too.

CIOs may have to consider the direct cost of those inputs too, as they explore the possibility of bringing cloud computing back in house. Setting aside the question of whether they can obtain the needed components, such as volume deliveries of NVIDIA chips, this move would force them to directly deal with energy and water challenges — not just the cost but, depending on where they chose to build, their availability too.

“If you, as a CIO, are not speaking with your operations and facilities teams around forecasting power requirements versus power availability, start immediately,” said Matt Kimball, VP/principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy. “Having lived in the IT world, I am well aware of how separate these organizations can be, where power is just a line item on a budget and nothing more. Talk to the team that’s managing power, cooling and datacenter infrastructure — from the rack out — to better understand how to use these resources most efficiently.”

It’s not just computing capacity that contributes to the cost of AI: IT needs to reexamine existing storage operations too, Kimball said.

“I would take a long look at my storage infrastructure and how to better optimize on and off prem. The infrastructure populating most enterprise datacenters is out of date and underutilized. Moving to servers that have the latest, densely populated CPUs is a first start,” he said. “Moving on-prem storage from spinning media to all flash has a higher up-front cost, but is far more energy efficient and performant. It’s easy to buy into the NVIDIA B300 or AMD MI355X craze. Or the Dell, HPE, or Lenovo AI factories. But is this much horsepower required for your AI and accelerated computing needs? Or are, say, RTX6000 PRO GPUs good enough? They are far more affordable and about 40% of the power consumption compared with a B300.”

A different perspective comes from Simon Ninan, SVP of business strategy at Hitachi Vanta, a company that sells many of these services, as the scale of these data centers is forcing IT to reconsider all previous assumptions about power usage. “AI’s energy demands are rendering traditional air cooling insufficient,” he said. “We’re seeing an increasing shift to liquid cooling for AI data centers, but a massive investment is also needed in innovations that cater to environmental boundaries.”

Source:: Computer World

A new version of LibreOffice, a popular open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, won’t run on 32-bit PCs, or support the Windows 7 or 8 operating systems.

The Document Foundation earlier this month released version 25.8 of the free productivity suite, which was downloaded 642,564 times in its first week, according to a blog entry on the organization’s website.

Most Windows software comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and most software vendors offer support for both for backward compatibility.

LibreOffice, which includes apps for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, vector graphics creation, and more, is popular among Linux users and is included in many Linux distributions. A version is also available for macOS.

The base desktop software is free of AI tools and targeted for customers who want an alternative to Office without the frills. A cloud-based paid version of LibreOffice is available at Collabora Online.

But more AI tools are coming to LibreOffice desktop in the form of extensions. Earlier this month, StableDiffusion released an AI image generator for the software. Chatbots and automated writing extensions are also now available for LibreOffice.

The number of LibreOffice adopters remains modest, but some individuals and organizations are giving it a look as cloud and AI security concerns mount around the market-leading office suites, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Denmark’s Ministry of Digitalization recently announced that it would move half of its employees to LibreOffice from Microsoft 365 this summer, with plans to cut off the Microsoft suite completely by year end.

The next version of LibreOffice is expected to be 26.2, which will be released next year.

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai Wordle is the super fun game from the NYT, which challenges players to use their extensive…
The post Wordle Hints & Answers For Today: August 28 appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Deepti Pathak OnePlus has recently introduced its Nord Buds 3r, promising clear sound and long-lasting comfort. The earbuds…
The post OnePlus Launches New Buds 3r With 54 Hour Battery Life appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

Apple’s most senior leaders so far seem to have failed to find consensus on how to move forward with Apple Intelligence. They recognize the company appears to be lagging in the generative AI (genAI) race, but management appears split between those who want to build it in Cupertino, and those who hope to buy their way to industry leadership.

So far, neither side seems to have the room, with one thing holding everyone back being the insanely high valuations being thrown at AI companies at this point in the bubble. 

Why?

Look it this way – the question has to be, “Why spend billions when some of these companies will be worth a great deal less once the AI bubble bursts, as it inevitably will?” It’s a reasonable position, given that valuations at the current levels are not sustainable. And while governments everywhere want to sell themselves cheap to climb into figurative bed with the current crop of genAI billionaires, they face massive public resistance to adopting the dystopian result of their dollar-drenched trysts. Russia’s intrusive Max app seems ripe to inspire similar behaviors from other authoritarian governments.

Being different

The other issue is differentiation. Apple is a product company, and for all the blather about artificial intelligence, the only thing that matters is how the tech can become part of its product family. If you glance at the many existing machine intelligence features already in its products, you’ll see that most of these supplement existing hardware. When it comes to Apple Intelligence, for Apple the North Star must be the need to ensure it continues to offer something unique.

To some extent, doing this with AI is fundamentally difficult, as this kind of general purpose intelligence will eventually become a homogenous block of different models using similar data (all the data in the world) to inform responses to similar questions.

With that inevitable homogenization, AI services may yet become utilities rather than differentiated products. So, it could make sense for Apple to avoid developing its own general purpose AI, resolving to create specific solutions that work much more effectively for specific use cases and relying on partnerships with these emerging AI-as-a-Service companies (AI-ASS?). That seems to be the Apple Intelligence way. 

In that picture, how much difference would an AI acquisition make?

The problems of acquihire

The only way in which such acquisitions might make a difference is if the company were to both gain access to the models and the people who made those models. If that’s how the company is looking at it, then any acquisition talks must necessarily require some commitments around employment and long-term loyalty to Cupertino.

There’s no point doing an acquihire if everybody leaves, and this seems to be what’s been happening with the smaller AI purchases Apple has made. This may be an Apple-specific human resources problem, or a corporate culture problem, or it may reflect the insane competition for staff in the field.

What this all boils down to is that if Apple can’t find an acquisition target that includes an employee transfer of people genuinely committed to Apple, then — other than IP and/or any political advantage it might gain — it doesn’t have a deal. It would just have less money in the bank and still be unable to find the talent.

National security

It’s worth noting that at least one of the current rumored Apple acquisition targets (Mistral), is likely to be seen as a company of national strategic importance to France. Mistral is France’s best-known AI company, with partnerships across the government and leading tech industry players.

It’s unclear whether France, which, like the rest of Europe, is now struggling with data sovereignty, will see letting the AI service provider slip into the hands of US Big Tech fit the national narrative. What I’m saying is that as the national importance of AI is revealed, the number of potential acquisitions Apple can reasonably expect government approval for will decline.

Made in California

Can Apple invent its own AI to match the others on the market? The latest reporting suggests Craig Federighi, Apple senior vice president for software engineering still believes it is possible, with Services Senior Vice President Eddy Cue in the “Add to Shopping Basket” camp. And it is possible that much depends on what surprises Apple can bring to the table once it ships its own context-savvy Siri in a few months’ time. 

Earlier this month, Federighi told staff that his AI team has achieved more than was originally promised. “This has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned,” he said.

If the company surprises and delights its audience, perhaps Apple will give those teams a little more time to build Apple’s own genAI solutions. If not, then perhaps those acquisition discussions will intensify. I can’t be certain but it is easy to imagine we’ll get a glimpse of some of what the company has put together during the iPhone launch on Sept. 9.

Partnerships

Then there’s partnership possibility. The problem with partnerships is that teaming up gives people credibility, and to some extent gives the AI companies the upper hand. There are also unexpected challenges — Apple’s current AI partner, OpenAI, is reportedly building its own AI products with former Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive. We can’t know the extent to which that hardware threatens Apple’s interests. But it can’t have gone completely unnoticed that Apple is apparently about to introduce additional support for Google Gemini and other AI services as alternatives to the existing support Apple Intelligence has for ChatGPT.

While the most recent chapter in Apple’s never-ending journey toward AI seems based on the narrative that the company can somehow buy its way to success, the truth is that any acquisition would be complicated. And in the absence of a determined management consensus, even with the company checkbook ready, no one seems to be making a move.

All the same, as tides turn toward new iPhones, don’t be too surprised if something makes your awe drop.

Follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

By Calum Chase AI agents are now being embedded across core business functions globally. Soon, these agents could be scheduling our lives, making key decisions, and negotiating deals on our behalf. The prospect is exciting and ambitious, but it also begs the question: who’s actually supervising them? Over half (51%) of companies have deployed AI agents, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has targeted a billion agents by the end of the year. Despite their growing influence, verification testing is notably absent. These agents are being entrusted with critical responsibilities in sensitive sectors, such as banking and healthcare, without proper oversight. AI agents require…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Partner Content Finding quality screen-free activities for kids gets harder each day. Parents like me struggle with boring…
The post Colorings.io Review: Best AI Coloring Page Generator for Kids & Adults appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Andrea Hak Watching robots awkwardly flop around, cause robot body pile-ups on the soccer field, and accidentally lose their heads while taking part in a 1500-metre sprint at the first Robot Humanoid Games in China was not only entertaining, it was a reminder of just how far robotics has come — and how far it still has to go. While humanoid robots still struggle to walk across a stage, in other corners of the world automation is quietly revolutionising industries. At Picnic Technologies, the Netherlands’ fastest growing online supermarket, robots are compiling your grocery orders so delivery ‘shoppers’ can get them from…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Hisan Kidwai Scuba diving is unquestionably one of the most surreal activities one can do. The feeling of…
The post AirBuddy: Scuba Diving Made Easy appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has a generative AI (genAI) service called Dash that users will soon be able to download and install.

“We plan to launch a self-serve version of Dash,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said during an earnings call earlier this month. “Basically, a version anyone can download and start using similar to what we did with Dropbox 1.0.”

Dash, which will be available for download later this year, includes document search, summarization, AI chatbots, and writing assistance for content in its cloud and third-party workflow services.

“You can think of Dash as both a standalone product that allows us to reach a new audience of people beyond our file-syncing audience. And it’s also the AI layer across Dropbox FSS (file sync and share) for our existing customers,” Houston said.

Dropbox, which started in 2008, made its name in file sharing and storage. Dash is positioned as independent from the company’s mainstream file-storage offerings, though customers can buy a bundle with both offerings.

“It’ll be a separate product and separate subscription,” Houston said.

Dash creates intelligence from documents users store with Dropbox. For example, users will be able to search for rich media files within the storage service.

“We’re seeing growing adoption of Dash Chat for answering questions, summarizing long documents, and providing draft writing assistance,” Houston said.

Additionally, the service plugs into other workflow tools such as Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, and Atlassian, from which it can analyze and locate documents, communications, records, reports, and contacts.

Dropbox is hoping the self-service model will attract more users to the company’s other wares. It did not offer information about pricing or target audience.

Since its inception, the storage provider has tried to convert free users to paid users. Virtually every subscriber started out as a free user in some form, executives said.

Dropbox has 700 million users, of which 18 million were paid users in 2024. (That figure is up from 15 million in 2020.)

Current file sync and share prices range from $7 to $199, depending on usage. Prices for business users start at $18.

Executives dropped hints that there could be some kind of free Dash service, with Dropbox hoping to convert those users to paid subscribers.

“Dash is a good example of providing a lot of new value to our existing free users beyond files, right? Because all of those free users have cloud content as well and are a good fit for Dash,” Houston said.

Source:: Computer World

“Disruptive products cannot be built from legacy chips,” Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji said when he spoke at ITF World in Belgium in May. He was there to receive the prestigious 2025 IMEC Innovation Award and shared some of the lessons Apple has acquired since it began building its own processors with the A4 chip inside the iPhone. 

During his speech, he explained how the scalable architecture Apple chose for its chip development is enabling the company to transform all its hardware. And he shared a few tips for intelligent hardware design, such as to always use the best available tools and technologies during development. 

“I always tell my team, we want to be gated by physics, nothing else,” he said.

iPhone and the future of computing

Apple’s processor journey really began years before Apple Silicon. But it was only when it began work on the iPhone that it committed to taking complete control of the processor development process. 

“The iPhone was seen as a full-blown computer,” he said. “To support its full feature set, it required an incredible amount of performance — but needed to deliver that within a constrained power.”

The company understood that while the easy path might be to use third-party processors, doing so made it hard to design products that stood out. Shifting to custom silicon was difficult, but it enabled the company to design in chip efficiency and gave it the chance to “control our destiny.”

Mobile tech in a Mac

What that means in terms of actual hardware is now reflected in the power and performance advantage characteristic of Apple silicon. And it’s a direct result of the original design decisions made about to the iPhone — decisions such as building chips optimized in such a way that the most “efficient part of the performance versus power curve coincides with the maximum sustained thermal envelope of the device its going into.”

In other words, Apple’s chips are built to deliver their most efficient performance when the devices are being used for quite demanding tasks. This can scale up for short-term higher-end chores, and tick down when all you want to do is check email or pick up some more cookies and adware while browsing. That efficiency by design, in conjunction with the hardware and software Apple also designs, makes for longer battery life and higher performance per watt.

It also makes for the sort of power efficiency you need to run multiple operations on the GPU, which makes Apple silicon highly suitable for on-device AI. It might seem ironic, but the design decisions made for the iPhone directly contributed to the processor choices Apple has made for its fleet of private cloud compute servers.

The fundamental building blocks

Transistor density is fundamental. “We rely on transistors as the chips get more complex,” Srouji said. “As our chips are getting more complex, the transistor as the fundamental building block is getting more important than ever.”

The 190 million transistors crammed inside the A4 and A4X chips that powered the iPhone and iPad 15 years ago would occupy just one tiny corner of the M3 Ultra chip’s 183 billion transistors today. Those numbers are why, for example, GPU performance on the M3 Ultra is 17,000 times that of the A4.

It is also why innovations such as support for unified memory and better performance per watt feeds into the Mac. It means the M1 MacBook Air delivered equivalent performance to that of an Intel MacBook Pro, with system performance scaling up with every model after that. Progress has been so fast that Apple is expected to introduce a Mac that uses an iPhone chip later this year.

The ability to design technologies in which Apple is only constrained by physics enables better design, thanks to the integration of software, hardware, and processors. “And thanks to our vertical integration any innovation here we can transfer to millions of products reaching millions of customers,” Srouji said.

The future remains unwritten

Apple hasn’t finished with chip design yet. It’s likely in a decade’s time we’ll see more progress, more performance, and more computational ability squeezed into Apple’s processors — particularly as we move to whatever the successor may be to the 2nm chips the company is now expected to use. It means you can expect more transistor density moving forward, which means more performance. 

Can we anticipate 17,000-fold increases? 

I don’t know. But from what Apple’s silicon leader is saying, the only barrier will be the laws of physics. Of course, as development gets close to the finite constraints of physics itself, we’ll see ever more focus on small wins that lead to better efficiency. Seeking such wins, don’t be too surprised to see Apple’s chip designers lean even more deeply into AI than they already do as they work to identify and test new solutions.

“Gen AI techniques have high potential to get more design work done in less time,” Srouji said. 

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

Source:: Computer World

By Partner Content For any senior Pokémon Go player, the desire for a joystick is understandable. The ability to…
The post How To Use Pokémon Go Joystick on iPhone and Android appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Carrie Osman Private equity deals hit an all-time high in 2021, peaking at a total value of more than $1tn, with an average deal size exceeding $1bn for the first time. Founders were media darlings, valuations soared, and investors raced to get a piece of the action.   By 2023, many of those same companies — such as Klarna and Stripe — had lost billions in value. Klarna’s valuation plummeted by 85% from its 2021 peak of $45.6bn to $6.7bn in 2022. Stripe also fell dramatically, from $95bn in 2021 to $50bn in 2023.   Fast forward to today, and even more tech companies…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Deepti Pathak Project Baki 3 is a popular Roblox fighting game inspired by the beloved anime series Baki….
The post Project Baki 3 Trello & Discord Link (2025) appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes