You can’t ignore the trend. Apple continues to be one of the big beneficiaries of the Windows 10 support shut down, with research from Counterpoint, IDC, Gartner, and others confirming Mac sales are increasing faster than the rate of PC industry growth. It means the switch is on.

Take the evidence, just in the last few weeks:

Counterpoint confirmed a 14.9% increase in Mac sales in Q3 2025, against an industry average of 8.1%.

IDC gave Apple a 13.7% growth rate in Mac sales, compared to what it saw as 9.4% industry growth. (It pegged Apple as holding 9% of the entire global PC market.)

Gartner determined that Apple experienced a 10.7% increase, with the industry reaching 69 million sales, up 8.2%.

With hundreds of millions of upgrades, percentages mean a lot

There are nuances of difference within the data points; many analysts see other PC makers also experiencing strong growth, with sales of smaller brand PCs seeing decline. But those slivers of difference don’t mask that all three analyst firms see Mac sales increasing at a rate that exceeds industry growth.

What this means for Apple is important. It means that with hundreds of millions of PCs still in use that need to be replaced because they cannot run Windows 11, more people than before are choosing to switch to Mac.

Certainly, not every customer purchasing a Mac is switching from Windows — many are upgrading existing Apple hardware, or may be shifting across from not owning any kind of PC. But the trend tells the tale of the resurgence of the Mac.

The forced Windows 11 upgrade isn’t the only story in town. 

Thinking Machines

The need to invest in tech capable of running artificial intelligence is another yarn. Those same hundreds of millions of PCs that don’t run Windows are very unlikely to be able to handle on-device AI, and with many companies seeking to use this tech to get things done, it’s mandatory that IT invest in PCs fit for the task.

The Mac, of course, has already become a convincing platform for AI. We know that analysts tend to look through the facts with a Windows-tainted lens, but even they recognize that AI PCs are the other string to the upgrader’s bow.

“The PC market’s rebound in 2025 is not just about replacing outdated systems, it is about preparing for what is next,” said Counterpoint’s Associate Director, David Naranjo. “Many enterprises are choosing AI-capable PCs to future-proof their fleets, even if they do not yet need those capabilities immediately. The next refresh cycle will be defined by intelligence at the edge, not just performance improvements.”

That story of edge intelligence matters a great deal. It’s a story that can only be well told by computers capable of delivering edge-based artificial intelligence, which is something you can already expect from any Mac sold since 2020, thanks to the introduction of Apple Silicon.

Apple Silicon, the great enabler

Companies such as WebAI are already selling Mac-based AI systems to deliver highly secure AI operations at the edge, no servers required. These will only become more popular as enterprise purchasers develope a better understanding of the need for sovereign data services and compliant data security protections around the use of cloud services.

There’s also the likely truth that as the venture capital funding dwindles, many current generative AI services will be forced to pass costs onto their users to stay in the game. That means companies will be looking for services that can work at the edge, are highly secure, and don’t threaten their future business with vendor lock in.

Speaking to an audience of Apple enterprise developers and admins at MacAD 2025, Chris Chapman, CTO at MacStadium put this into perspective: “Apple has created a completely capable and powerful AI processing platform that speaks to the energy demand, the privacy, and the security that people are demanding around AI.”

Apple Silicon is its own story, of course, but as Apple’s recent M5 Macs showed, Apple is on a fast track to processor development. Early benchmarks show the M5 processors inside the portable entry-level MacBook Pro compete against the leading desktop processors from both Intel and AMD. Apple will introduce desktop versions of the M5 chips, and once it does, don’t be surprised to see these machines leap to the top, or near the top, of the performance charts.

The trend toward increasing Mac adoption isn’t just fashion, it reflects the extent to which Apple’s PCs now meet many of the evolving needs of business users.

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Source:: Computer World

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OpenAI on Thursday rolled out its latest offering, a comprehensive data collection and analysis capability called “company knowledge”. And although vendors have been granted access to a wide range of enterprise data for decades — think of malware detection that reviews all messages and downloads — analysts and industry observers see this OpenAI effort as being meaningfully different.

Part of that difference is the extreme depth of access that OpenAI is proposing, along with a lack of assurances about how that sensitive enterprise data would be used and protected. But an even greater factor is OpenAI itself and how comfortable enterprise IT executives are about trusting a relatively young company with this intense level of access.

Making granting that trust yet more difficult is the lack of clarity around the ultimate OpenAI business model. Specifically, how much OpenAI will leverage sensitive enterprise data in terms of selling it, even with varying degrees of anonymization, or using it to train future models. 

Jeff Pollard, VP/principal analyst for Forrester, said trust, or the lack of trust, is the most critical background factor in this announcement.

“Whether it’s Microsoft Copilot M365, Gemini Enterprise, Anthropic Claude Enterprise Access, and now OpenAI company knowledge, the choice is really between the devil you know — the vendor you already work with — and who do you trust?” Pollard said. “The capabilities across all these solutions are similar, and benefits exist: Context and intelligence when using AI, more efficiency for employees, and better knowledge management.”

But Pollard said the risks of such an offering are equally important. “Data privacy, security, regulatory, compliance, vendor lock-in, and, of course, AI accuracy and trust issues. But for many organizations, the benefits of maximizing the value of AI outweigh the risks.”

The ROI debate

This ROI debate is intrinsic to all AI strategy decisions and goes well beyond this one OpenAI product/service rollout.

Enterprise IT executives “need to remember one important fact: Enterprise AI is shifting from isolated applications to connected agents and agentic systems that integrate with technologies already deployed to maximize value for users,” Pollard said. “These are high risk, high reward integrations that are unavoidable. These solutions exacerbate existing challenges related to identity and access management [such as] entitlements, data security including labeling/categorization, compliance, and governance, but the perceived productivity and efficiency gains make it too tempting for businesses to pass up.”

OpenAI’s statement gave perhaps the best illustration of how extensively they want to integrate with all manner of enterprise data. 

“With company knowledge, the information in your connected apps—like Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive and GitHub—becomes more useful and accessible. It’s powered by a version of GPT‑5 that’s trained to look across multiple sources to give more comprehensive and accurate answers. Every response includes clear citations so you can see where the information came from and trust the results,” OpenAI said. “For example, if you have an upcoming client call, ChatGPT can create a briefing for you based on recent messages from your account channel in Slack, key details from emails with your client, the last call notes in Google Docs, and any escalations from Intercom support tickets since your last meeting.”

How will the data be used?

The only data use restriction that OpenAI’s statement mentions does not address how OpenAI will use the data, but only says that it won’t access information that an individual end user wouldn’t have system permission to view.

“Anyone on ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Edu can use company knowledge. Company knowledge respects your existing company permissions, so ChatGPT only has access to what each user is already authorized to view,” the OpenAI statement said.

Some industry officials said enterprises will have to rely on legal contracts, including service level agreements, to control what a vendor can do with their data. The problem is that the data that OpenAI would access would also be available to a very large number of employees, contractors, and third parties. If some of this sensitive data was later discovered on the dark web or in the possession of a data broker, it would be all but impossible to prove from where that data was accessed.

“That data would be difficult to track” and that would make it easy “to find ways to avoid the repercussions” and to potentially deny that the data came from OpenAI, said Brady Lewis, the senior director of AI Innovation at the Marketri marketing consulting firm.

“This is one of those announcements that sounds great on paper, until you start thinking about what it actually means for your organization. The productivity promise is legit. Instead of toggling between Slack to find assignments, tabbing to Google Drive for specific files, or hunting for names and numbers, ChatGPT can deliver all that information directly into your chat session,” Lewis said. “Here’s where my 25+ years in tech makes me pause. Employees are submitting company data to ChatGPT and other tools with little to no oversight, often including PII or PCI data. So while OpenAI is building enterprise-grade controls, the real question is whether organizations are prepared to govern their employees properly.”

Lewis said that much of this comes down to OpenAI’s perception within enterprise IT. He said that OpenAI is seen as “overpromising and underdelivering. They haven’t proven their credibility, their trustworthiness.”

Risks too serious to ignore

Andrew Gamino-Cheong, CTO at Trustible, said his biggest concern with company knowledge is the unintentional loss of data control.

“The main risk for this set up is accidental data leakage of privileged information. This may be exacerbated if systems like ChatGPT don’t leave a breadcrumb [audit trail] that they accessed that information,” said Gamino-Cheong, who does not recommend deploying the feature yet. “There needs to be a very clear understanding of all of the access controls in place.”

Gary Longsine, CEO at IllumineX, said that he still sees OpenAI as a startup that doesn’t precisely know what it wants to be when it grows up — and that includes knowing specifically how it will make its money.

Longsine said that the risks of company knowledge are too serious to ignore. “No company in their right mind would ever [deploy this],” he said, unless they desperately needed this kind of data integration and analysis. And even if that enterprise did need such things, they should demand “their own instance of the LLM to prevent data leakage, and that would require funding a data center. That’s the only way I know how to do this and still protect enterprise data.”

Another cybersecurity executive, Bobby Kuzma, the director of offensive cyber operations at cybersecurity consulting firm ProCircular, added, “For companies that have solid data classification controls, there might be some benefit here. Unfortunately, that’s a very tiny fraction of the universe of organizations.”

But there are important questions to be answered. “OpenAI’s integration is leveraging the individual user’s access. That’s nice,” he said. “[But] how long is that access maintained? Does it only stay valid for that specific interaction with the user or is there longer term storage of tokens that could be leveraged if OpenAI is compromised? This has me more than a bit leery.”

And even if the vendor can be trusted to not be co-opted by other third parties, Kuzma asked what would happen if the US government hit OpenAI with a national security letter and demanded full access? 

But he mostly was worried about the financial incentives for OpenAI to use that data in a wide range of ways. “Think about an anonymized dataset of top manufacturing companies worldwide. Can you imagine the economic value of that, of monetizing access to that data?”

Asked what advice he would offer enterprise IT executives about using company knowledge, Kuzma was direct. “Please don’t,” he said, adding, “we don’t have a long track record of seeing how OpenAI deals with data access. They are subject to the same pressures as every other startup: ‘First become cashflow positive and then maybe we can think about security’.”

Source:: Computer World

Are you sure you’re still alive? If so, you may fall for a phishing scam aimed at getting the master login passwords of LastPass password manager users.

OK, this sounds weird, but in some ways it isn’t. If a person dies, their immediate family may not know how to get into the deceased’s password manager, and may contact the vendor asking for access. Scammers suspected of being part of the CryptoChameleon cyber criminal group are trying to take advantage of that by sending oddly-worded phishing messages to LastPass customers.

The goal, presumably, is not only to get LastPass login credentials, but also to access the user’s cryptocurrency wallet and drain its contents.

On Friday, LastPass sent a warning to customers about the phishing campaign, which began in the middle of this month, because the messages are spoofing the LastPass domain to appear to come from the company.

The subject line reads ‘Legacy Request Opened (URGENT IF YOU ARE NOT DECEASED),’ and the message begins: “A death certificate was uploaded by a family member to regain access to the LastPass account of . If you have not passed away and you believe that this is a mistake, please reply to this email with ‘Stop.’”

The email says that a support case has been opened to execute the request, and includes fabricated information regarding a supposed agent assigned to the case, including an agent ID number, the date the case opened, and the case priority. 

It also includes a link to cancel the request, which in fact directs the intended victim to an attacker-controlled URL where the victim is asked to enter their LastPass master password, in an attempt to harvest their credentials.

The email concludes with the statement “Your security is our top priority. Never share your master password with anyone – including us!” 

In some cases, a threat actor has also phoned people, claiming to be from LastPass and urging them to go to the phishing site and enter their master password.

In its alert, LastPass reminded users that it never asks for their master password.

A tricky one to prevent

David Shipley, head of Canadian-based employee security awareness firm Beauceron Security, called the pitch “the most creative” phishing lure he’s seen this year.

“Have to wonder if they used AI to come up with the concept,” he added.  

However, Roger Grimes, data-driven defense CISO advisor at KnowBe4, said it’s “far from” the oddest phishing lure he’s seen; social engineering is involved in up to 90% of all successful hacks, he said in an email.

“In this case, the social engineering hack was in convincing the user to download malware,” he said. “That’s a tricky one to prevent. I always tell people to learn the following and practice it religiously: If you receive an unexpected message asking you to do something you’ve never done before, at least for that sender, research the request using known trusted methods before performing. That will save you in 99% of social engineering scams, including this one.”

Staff should be using MFA

CSOs and IT managers should ensure that any password managers their employees use have phishing-resistant multifactor authentication or require an additional login factor, so if staff fall for a scam like this, the scammer can’t log in just using stolen credentials, Grimes said.

If the corporate approved password manager doesn’t allow MFA for logging into the app, it should have some additional login factor – for example, making the employee provide other confidential information that is far harder to obtain. 

Combating phishing requests for password manager credentials requires a combination of user education and adding friction to the logins by requiring more than just the master password and MFA to access accounts or add new devices, said Shipley, who pointed out that some other password management providers require access to a secret key in addition to a master password to add access to a new device.

IT leaders should be sending an e-mail blast to employees to let them know about the scam, linking to the LastPass blog, and encourage them to report any e-mails that look as though they’re coming from LastPass, he said.

The LastPass warning includes suspicious IP addresses and URLs as references for infosec leaders. It has taken down the initial phishing site.

Scam going after ‘a broad user base’

LastPass wouldn’t disclose to CSO how many, if any, customers fell for this scam.

Asked if the campaign is targeting enterprise customers as well as consumers, a representative from the LastPass threat intelligence, mitigation and escalation team said it is targeting “a broad user base.”

CSOs and IT leaders should warn employees not to click on emails with the subject line “Legacy Request Opened,” the spokesperson said, and to report suspicious emails or phone calls claiming to be from LastPass.

According to the LastPass warning, the URL associated with this campaign has been linked by Google Threat Intelligence with the known cybercriminal group CryptoChameleon (also known as UNC5356). The group is associated with targeting of cryptocurrency exchanges and users with the intent to steal cryptocurrency. The group previously leveraged LastPass as part of a phishing kit in April 2024.

Other indicators of malicious behavior associated with this campaign, says LastPass, include the threat actors’ use of known bulletproof host NICENIC to host the phishing site, and the attempted direct social engineering, which are again consistent with previous CryptoChameleon behavior

In its advisory, the company also included the indicators of compromise, along with a list of URLs associated with the malicious IP addresses used by the attackers.  

LastPass asks customers to forward any phishing emails or screen captures of texts that are targeting its products to [email protected].

Source:: Computer World

In a victory for surveillance capitalism, Apple may be forced to leave its users in Europe vulnerable to rapacious ad data collection in response to “intense lobbying” by politicians in the region. Apple warns these lobbying efforts mean the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, which helps prevent apps from tracking what you do across services and websites for advertising purposes, might need to be disabled. 

Apple may be forced to withdraw ATT

ATT gives people the chance to find out what data firms are collecting about them, forces the companies to openly request permission to do so, and gives users protection when they won’t honor such requests. 

“Intense lobbying efforts in Germany, Italy and other countries in Europe may force us to withdraw this feature to the detriment of European consumers,” Apple said in a statement provided to the German Press Agency.

In Germany, officials say the design of ATT could violate regulations. Apple has proposed various fixes, but these have not been accepted so far — and those that have been suggested by regulators are complex and would undermine ATT. 

It’s hard to imagine who might be behind this intense lobbying effort. Shortly after Apple introduced ATT in 2020, Facebook/Meta began to take out full page ads in which it claimed the feature would be bad for small business. Ad agencies complained, too, presumably because their data broking companies would find it harder to gather data on people. 

“What some companies call ‘personalized experiences’ are often veiled attempts to gather as much data as possible about individuals, build extensive profiles on them, and then monetize those profiles,” Apple wrote in 2020.

The importance of privacy

Apple has always pushed hard on the need for user privacy. Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken about the threat of a surveillance economy and Craig Federighi, Apple’s software vice president, gave an extensive speech on the topic at the European Data Protection and Privacy Conference in 2020.

“The mass centralization of data puts privacy at risk,” he said then, “no matter who’s collecting it and what their intentions might be. So ,we believe Apple should have as little data about our customers as possible.

“Now, others take the opposite approach. They gather, sell, and hoard as much of your personal information as they can. The result is a data-industrial complex, where shadowy actors work to infiltrate the most intimate parts of your life and exploit whatever they can find — whether to sell you something, to radicalize your views, or worse. That’s unacceptable. And the solution has to start with not collecting the data in the first place.”

What Europe says is not what Europe does

Since then, we’ve seen European and other regulators totally ignore Apple’s arguments concerning consumer privacy — sometimes in direct contradiction to GDPR — in favor of nebulous ideas around competition. What that really means is that while they claim to care about privacy with GDPR, they seem happy to subvert it to foster the evolution of a surveillance-based ad economy.

ATT is an important tool to help both empower customers and boost awareness of the need to fight for privacy.

Its existence calls to mind a famous comment from Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, who once said: “I believe people are smart and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.”

Choice for billionaires

It’s not the first time Meta seems to have held the day in the EU. Apple has complained that its competitor has attempted to exploit some of the forced changes of the EU’s Digital Markets Act to attempt to exfiltrate user data. Regulators seem to be pretty deaf to that accusation, too, potentially showing the kind of industries they hope to nurture in Europe with the DMA. What isn’t clear is whether those are the kinds of businesses Europeans want them to support — and where is the choice to stick with pure Apple if they want?

“We will continue to urge the relevant authorities in Germany, Italy and across Europe to allow Apple to continue providing this important privacy tool to our users,” Apple said. 

I wish them luck in that struggle.

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Source:: Computer World

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AI browsers may be smart, but they’re not smart enough to block a common threat: Malicious extensions.

That’s the conclusion of researchers at SquareX, who on Thursday released a report showing how attackers can exploit AI sidebars through compromised browser extensions.

This attack vector isn’t new. Malicious extensions have been inserted into browser web stores to infect standard browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and others for years.

What SquareX discovered are malicious extensions that can spoof the legitimate AI sidebars people use for queries. Their goal is to trick users into going to malicious websites, running data exfiltration commands, or installing backdoors. AI sidebar spoofing even works on the just-released OpenAI Atlas browser, SquareX says.

One solution for CISOs and CIOs is to ban the use of AI browsers, it suggests. That assumes the IT department can manage which browsers staff are using, particularly if they are allowed to use their own internet-connected devices. At the very least, IT must audit all extensions installed by employees for AI and non-AI browsers, the report says.

Treat anything AI with zero-trust protocols

CISOs and CIOs need to treat anything AI with the strongest zero-trust protocols available, commented Ed Dubrovsky, chief operating officer of incident response firm Cypfer, at least until some better functioning guardrails are established. 

“Establish a set of guardrails around AI use and functionality,” he said, “and if you are allowing AI vulnerable software into your corporate network, segment it into a place where it can’t get into the Digital Crown Jewels, or even have an awareness of them.” 

He pointed out that AI is a completely different playing field, and CSOs are not yet prepared for it. The challenge is that IT leaders are trying to think of AI as a new tool or toolset and are trying to apply software development and maintenance methodologies to its management. 

But in his view, AI is closer to “I just hired 100 new employees with very little vetting or appropriate security controls, how do I secure my assets in case some of them are malicious?”

“AI is not only a language chatbot, but it also has agentic function where tasks are defined and deployed, and AI software can be written and deployed by AI,” he said. “This pushes the human away from the keyboard, in a way, and replaces it with a new software capability.” 

The risk is that AI is not, and likely never will be, completely foolproof, he added. There may come a day where AI will be powerful enough to avoid most human ability to fool it, but, he asked, can it avoid being manipulated by other AIs? 

‘Dumpster fires’

David Shipley, head of Canadian employee security awareness training firm Beauceron Security, agrees.

“I think if CISOs are bored and want to spice up their lives with an incident, they should roll out these AI-powered hot messes to their users,” he said .

“But, if they’re like most CISOs and they have lots of problems, but free time and boredom aren’t on that list, they should avoid these dumpster fires [AI browsers] at all costs.”

Building and supporting a legitimate browser and extension ecosystem is difficult work, he argued, pointing out that even Apple, Google, and Microsoft still have issues.

“I think it’s a mistake to think of the risk as just being about extensions,” he added. “It’s the fundamental DNA of these browsers that is bad; the companies aren’t incented to pay enough attention to the problems, and bad extensions are just the straw that breaks cybersecurity’s back.”

How it works

CISOs have a tough challenge: It’s not hard to fool an employee into downloading and installing a malicious extension for any browser; browser extensions are supposed to be attractive add-on utilities such as password managers or AI productivity assistants. They are promoted in phishing and smishing messages, social media posts and, when threat actors are able, uploaded to marketplaces such as the Google Chrome Web Store. They can be malware disguised as a legitimate extension or can be a compromised version of one.

In AI Sidebar Spoofing, says the SquareX report, once a victim opens a new AI browser tab, the malicious extension injects JavaScript into the web page to create a fake sidebar that looks exactly like a legitimate sidebar. When the user enters a prompt into the spoofed sidebar, the extension hooks into its AI engine. But if the prompt requests certain instructions or guides, the responses can be manipulated to include additional instructions to the user. So, for example, if the user asks for good file sharing sites, the malicious extension might provide a link to the attacker’s file sharing site that requests high risk OAuth permissions that it can harvest. In the hands of a hacker, they could allow access to the victim’s email.

In one test, when a SquareX researcher asked a malicious sidebar extension how to install the Homebrew package manager for macOS or Linux, the instructions included an installation command line that executed a reverse shell command that would have connected the victim’s device to the attacker’s server. That would have given the attacker a system shell in which to execute commands on the victim’s machine.

It’s critical that infosec leaders set granular browser-native policies that prevent users from carrying out malicious tasks as instructed by a fake AI sidebar, says the report. These would include a policy that blocks advanced phishing sites using advanced machine learning and page heuristic analysis, a policy that  blocks high risk permissions from being granted to non-allowlisted apps, and a policy that warns users about and blocks copies of malicious/risky Linux commands.

The research “is a warning shot for the early days of agentic browsing and [reminds users] that the implicit trust model of the UI needs rethinking,” said Gabrielle Hempel, security operations strategist at Exabeam.

“The main issue here is that agentic-AI browsers introduce an entirely new attack surface. This attack, a malicious extension injecting a fake AI sidebar overlay that looks like the real one, allows threat actors to hijack the ‘trusted’ AI assistant UI and trick users into executing dangerous operations,” she pointed out. “Organizations need to be taking this seriously, because when you delegate browsing and actions to an AI sidebar, you are elevating what previously might have been a minor risk into a material risk to cloud assets, credentials, and devices.”

IT leaders should restrict AI browser use for high-risk functions until they are proven secure, she advised, adding that, because the attack uses an extension with host and storage permissions, organizations should revisit their extension approval workflows for those as well. In fact, any productivity tool that requests broad access should require scrutiny.

“Segmentation is also important once these tools are implemented: least privilege applies here and AI interaction with certain tabs/services should be limited,” she said. 

Source:: Computer World

Reddit this week filed suit against Perplexity and three other companies — Oxylabs UAB, AWM Proxy, and Serp Api — for allegedly engaging in so-called AI scraping without authorization. According to the lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, the four companies collected millions of posts on Reddit with the aim of monetizing them.

Scrapers bypass technical protections to steal data that can then be sold to clients who want the material for AI training. Reddit is a prime target because it is one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created, Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee said in a statement cited by the AP.

In June, Reddit filed a similar lawsuit against Anthropic, another AI company accused of collecting data without authorization. And last year, it demanded money from Microsoft for material it said the company had used for training purposes.

Source:: Computer World

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A new international study coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC shows that AI assistants distort news content nearly half of the time. The research included 22 public service broadcasters in 18 countries and 14 languages.

In the study, more than 3,000 AI responses from Chat GPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity were analyzed by professional journalists. The results showed that 45% of all responses contained at least one serious error, 31% had inadequate or misleading source citations, and 20% contained major factual errors such as fabricated details or outdated information.

Google’s Gemini was the worst performer with problems in 76% of its responses — mainly due to a lack of source attribution.

“This research shows conclusively that these shortcomings are not isolated incidents,” EBU Media Director and Deputy Director-General Jean Philip De Tender said in a statement. “They are systematic, transnational and multilingual, and we believe this jeopardizes public trust. When people don’t know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, and that can discourage democratic participation.”

As part of the project, the EBU and the BBC have launched a “News Integrity in AI Assistants Toolkit” to help AI developers and users improve the quality of responses and increase media literacy.

The organizations also called on the EU and national authorities to apply existing rules on information integrity, digital services and media pluralism, and to introduce an ongoing independent review of AI assistants.

Open AI, Microsoft, Google and Perplexity AI have not yet commented on the study.

Source:: Computer World

Apple device management and security company Kandji has changed its name to Iru, reflecting a new approach to what it does while opening its offer up to Windows and Android. It means enterprises shifting to Apple tech can now manage all their legacy equipment using the same console — and benefit from Iru’s AI-powered unified IT and security platform introduced on Wednesday.

The Apple device management industry kind of grew up from nowhere. Now, as Apple enterprise deployment accelerates, market players are turning their hungry eyes on Windows and Linux. (Admins on those platforms also want effective tools that are easy to use.) 

I spoke with Kandji-now-Iru CEO Adam Pettit to find out more about what his company is doing, how he sees Apple’s accelerating surge in business and Iru’s decision to open up to Windows and Android.

Now managing Windows and Android, too

“The big change with Iru is that the company is no longer only about Apple device management, but now offers MDM capabilities for Windows and Android,” Pettit said in an interview. These capabilities extend across all three of the company’s primary services, including device management, endpoint protection and response capabilities, and vulnerability management, all three of which will become cross platform.

It’s not about leaving Apple to explore new pastures, he explained. “The first thing that’s really important to us, though, is making sure that it’s clear to customers that, at the end of the day, we are still as committed as ever to delivering the best in market, Apple device management and security solution. That remains unchanged. Customers that want to manage and secure their Apple devices can still come to us.”

It makes business sense

Opening up to other platforms makes business sense. Pettit confirmed that the percentage of devices in use at the organizations his company is working with is definitely trending toward Apple. “While a year or two ago, perhaps 20 to 30% of their workforce used Macs, now it’s 50 to 60%,” he said.

He also noted that over 80% of the customers who use Kandji for Apple device management security use something else, such as InTune, to manage their Windows or Android devices.“Dozens of customers every week who like our management tools for Apple — they have been asking for Windows support,” he said. 

(Perhaps reflecting Iru’s core commitment to Apple kit, IT admins can toggle Windows/Android support off if they don’t use it, removing any references to that support from the management interface.)

“We estimate roughly 20% of our customers are Apple only,” Pettit said.

What’s available?

Iru is a series of services unified by what’s called the Iru Context Model, “a unified context layer that builds a living map across users, apps, devices, posture, policy, and events.” Iru AI turns that live context into insights, actions, and audit-ready evidence to deliver outcomes point solutions can’t match, the company said.

“We use Iru AI in our combined products to do basically everything — map…, analyze, create custom tailored controls, answer questions from a customer trust portal, and so on,” Pettit said. “Your AI is basically a collection of capabilities that sits on top of and kind of uses our context model, which is this shared understanding of your environment.”

The Iru platform consists of the following:

Workforce Identity in the form of password-free single sign-on with hardware-backed passkeys and context-aware access to every app.

Endpoint Management, which includes onboarding, updating, and policy control across Apple, Windows, and Android — all with a single lightweight endpoint agent.

Endpoint Detection and Response based on machine learning-enhanced detections with autonomous containment and remediation.

Vulnerability Management with full visibility into software risks on Macs and Windows hardware and autonomous threat response powered by Iru AI.

Compliance Automation and a public portal to share certifications, reports, and security posture.

It seems relevant to note that JAMF introduced its own AI-powered security tools earlier this week.

Making the powerful simple

“With Iru, we collapse the stack and give IT and security teams time and control back,” said Pettit. “What made Kandji work was elegance through abstraction and automation as a force multiplier. With Iru, we’ve translated that approach into a new platform for the AI era. We’re bringing identity and access, endpoint security and management, and compliance automation together in one AI-powered platform so lean teams can move faster with less overhead.

“The reality is that one reason customers love Kandji, is the deep level of abstraction it provides.”

That means if they want something to be done, such as encryption, they can use the system to deploy it without the need to worry about which protocol it uses. It makes it possible to generate completely tailored controls with the click of a button. “We’re moving from endpoint to cross-platform endpoint, identity and compliance, all in one platform,” he said.

Trading places

Another trend Pettit sees reflected in IT is a tendency toward dissolving traditional siloes between, say, device management and security. The company cited recent research that showed many enterprise IT and security teams today juggle dozens of point tools with separate consoles and data silos, leading to “no shared context or single view, fractured workflows, constant tab switching, and dropped handoffs.”

That kind of inefficient approach is falling away with the convergence between historically different teams such as IT and security. “We’re also seeing a big convergence between compliance, security, and IT,” Pettit said. Iru aims to collapse these differences to give IT more time and efficiency than it had before.

“The alternative is all of these stitched-together point solutions that are used by these different personas that have to communicate with each other about what’s happening. And so, by bringing them all together on one platform, we’re actually building in a way that aligns with the kind of organizational shift that’s happening,” he said.

The Iru platform is available today for new customers, while existing Kandji users will transition to the new service. Iru also offers comprehensive migration support for customers moving from other systems.

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

Source:: Computer World

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Amazon plans to use automation to replace more than 600,000 workers who would otherwise be hired in the United States by 2033, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. By that time, the company is expected to sell about twice as many goods as it does today.

Amazon’s robotics team is reportedly working toward the goal of automating 75% of its entire business. By 2027, it is expected to eliminate around 160,000 jobs in the US, saving the company an estimated $12.6 billion — equivalent to around 30 cents per item delivered.

To avoid negative publicity, Amazon is reportedly actively avoiding words such as “automation” and “AI” and instead talking about “advanced technology” and “cobots” — robots that work alongside humans. In a statement to Times, Amazon says the leaked documents do not reflect the company’s entire strategy and that no one has been instructed to avoid specific terms.

Source:: Computer World

Two big tech events took place last week: Microsoft declared hundreds of millions of Windows 10 PCs dead as the dodo — at least when it comes to continuing support — while Apple introduced the world’s best-performing AI PCs, equipped with its industry-leading M5 processor.

While it’s unwise to read too much into either event, it’s hard not to see some connections once you add things up. Because, while gently avoiding too overt a challenge to Microsoft (bar one amusing ad), Apple is clearly signaling to hundreds of millions of people stranded on Windows 10 that it might be worth getting a Mac.

All eyes on the AI

The company makes a good point. With its M5 processors, Apple now offers the world’s most powerful AI PCs, machines quite capable of running Windows in virtual machines, while also being up to the challenge of running large language models (LLMs) natively on the device. Well-designed, popular among employees, and highly performant, Mac in the enterprise is most certainly back.

Reflecting this, many in the Apple-focused MDM space are now looking to extend their services to also cater to legacy platforms like Windows — enabling IT admins working to deploy Macs to add all their legacy kit to the same device management systems. That means it has never been easier to deploy Apple devices in an existing Windows-based infrastructure. 

What about security?

Will PC users listen? It’s hard to say, but what is clear is that hundreds of millions must now make a tough and consequential choice: Do they risk continuing to use an operating system that isn’t supported any longer, accepting all the security risks that go with that decision? Do they pay the non-trivial cost of upgrading to Windows 11, which likely also involves major spending on new hardware? Or do they look at alternative platforms, including Mac, Linux or even Chrome? 

Doing nothing is also an option, but it’s a decision that exposes both consumer and business users to increased risk in the long-term. You just know that hackers will already be working to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in Windows 10, the difference being that Microsoft will no longer act to mitigate against them. Which means doing nothing will become a bigger and bigger risk as time passes, even as hackers scan the ‘net looking for machines running the old OS to attack.

Hackers aren’t stupid. They know, as I do, that as many as one in five Windows PCs will not run Windows 11, which equates to hundreds of millions of vulnerable targets, all running an operating system which, inherently and despite decades of “Patch Tuesdays” remains insecure. If you’re running Windows 10 PCs at home or in business, I’d advise you to take them offline immediately, before they are compromised.

What about sustainability?

Whatever the decision, the brutal truth is that hundreds of millions of PCs that can just about run Windows 10 will now be heading for the trash. While many will be taken apart for parts, this still leaves many businesses with a headache around sustainability. How do you equate deleting hundreds of PCs against existing sustainability targets? 

Apple is a sustainability leader at this point, with its commitments to carbon neutrality setting it ahead of the industry. The decision to balance Scope 3 CO2 emissions against renewable energy production isn’t just a good news story for Apple, it’s also an instant win for any enterprise purchaser seeking to deploy tech kit that helps meet their own business sustainability targets. This is because by compensating for the energy used during the life of its products, Apple is effectively giving IT a zero sum item to help balance their own internal targets. 

Get a Mac, and not only will the overall energy bill drop, but the environmental costs of using those Macs is already being written off, thanks to Apple; sustainability now ships in the box.

Life is about choices

I don’t run Windows 10. I kind of shifted to Mac when it was running System 6 and can still remember the thrill of the System 7 introduction. There are many millions of Windows users who feel an equal commitment to their chosen platform. However, if I pretend to be in the same situation as they now happen to be in, I think I’d be tempted to try something new.

That is because I can imagine that if Apple were forcing me to purchase a new Mac this year, whether I wanted to or not, and a competitor was offering a completely different platform that happened to be easier to use, cheaper to run, sustainable, faster, more secure and quite capable of running an OS I was used to as a VM, I’d be tempted to at least take a look. This is the choice hundreds of millions of Windows 10 users face in real time. It will be interesting to see how many of them end up with a Mac this holiday season.

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

Source:: Computer World

By Adarsh Verma Every CEO knows the feeling. You ask your team for the numbers you need for a…
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By Hisan Kidwai Wordle is the super fun game from the NYT, where you put your vocabulary to the…
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With Foundation Models, Apple has given developers the power to use Apple Intelligence large language models (LLMs) from within their own apps using a few lines of code. This is an important step toward the endpoint AI ecosystem the company is painstakingly working to create. 

I spoke with developers from The Omni Group to find out more about what these models can do and how they use them in their apps — specifically CEO Ken Case and legendary evangelist for automation on Apple’s products, Sal Soghoian.

Introducing Omni Automation

The obvious place to deploy foundation models was within Omni Automation, the company’s existing tool for automation across its products. Omni Automation, using Apple Foundation Models (AFMs) and JavaScript, lets users locally generate clean, structured, multi-level data to automate tasks and workflows easily and securely — all within constrained token limits. Thanks to Foundation Models, the team has been able to make access to Apple’s own LLMs available to Omni Automation users through JavaScript. The integration provides structured, multi-level data using schemas (JSON).

In a quick and impressive demo, Soghoian showed how Omni Automation, combined with AFMs, helps users build powerful, customized workflows that use Apple Intelligence within more complex automated workflows. 

It’s incredibly textual

During the demo, Soghoian stressed that AFMs can be interacted with using both text-based conversation and JSON schemas, which offers a more powerful and precise way of making AFM requests than using Shortcuts.

He showed how you can use JavaScript in Omni Automation to:

Send a natural language prompt to AFM.

Receive either raw text or structured JSON data back.

Or retrieve detailed multi-layered data (e.g., planet type, distance from the sun) using more advanced schema examples.

He also showed how it becomes possible to use the intelligence to plan projects, suggest routines, estimate tasks, plan, and more. The combined solution functions more as an intelligent assistant within user-defined workflows than a free-roaming AI agent.

There are some restrictions. Apple currently limits prompts to 4,096 tokens, but this can be extended by handing off some tasks to other apps and services. The limit is due to hardware constraints and efforts to keep the model lightweight for all users. 

(It somewhat reflects computing’s early days: “I can remember when we had 4MB of memory in Macs,” they agreed.)

“You can provide the foundation models with tools that it can call when it doesn’t know how to do something…. Each tool can actually be a perfect oracle, unlike the language model, where it can just make up answers,” said Soghoian.

What happens in AFM, stays in AFM

The thing is, all the automation takes place on the device. Case and Soghoian are advocates for this approach, as it means their customers can work with confidential information while maintaining complete privacy. Given the cost of computers, components, and computing, less is most certainly more, so it makes sense to bring AI services out of the cloud and onto the device, which is precisely what Apple’s approach seems to be.

“The exciting thing about what Apple is doing from our point of view with these Foundation Models is that they’re running on the silicon that is already at our fingertips, right?” said Case.  “We’re not going off and hitting somebody else’s server in the cloud and using who knows how much energy to do whatever it’s trying to do.

“We know exactly how much energy our laptops are using because we charge them and we know all of the data is being maintained locally on our device, so it’s secure. There’s no risk of, you know, some confidential information being used to train somebody on this data, and who knows what happens next.”

That matters when you make professional-level products. 

OmniFocus, for example, is a task management solution aimed at pro users who want the benefit of AI to help them structure tasks and time, but don’t want that information exfiltrated, or used to fuel platoons of tedious follow-up advertising. “I don’t want to all of a sudden be on everybody’s phone list because I wanted to know how to add solar power to my home,” said Soghoian.

Privacy and AI

Privacy is important to the ultimate expression of AI. Public attitudes to privacy are changing as people who once accepted that companies like Google tracked their searches in exchange for better services become more cautious and protective of their data. Omni Group’s approach mirrors Apple’s own outlook, which is to build software that keeps users in control of their data. That means data can stay entirely on the device, and any information selected to sync with Omni’s servers is end-to-end encrypted so Omni cannot read it. Users can also host their own WebDAV sync servers.

Case, whose company maintains its own tight privacy controls, said he remains optimistic about privacy. He doesn’t believe it will be lost unless everyone stops trying to protect it. Apple’s public stance on the matter has helped maintain the conversation on the matter.

The power of Apple Silicon

Soghoian led Apple’s own automation efforts for years. He observed that with Apple Intelligence, Apple is now able to implement ideas the team originally explored years ago because of the sheer power and performance of Apple Silicon. “Knowing what I know about what we used to do,” Soghoian said, “I think that the next stage is going to be very exciting, and people will forget about everything else once the last pieces come into play.”

For Soghoian, the move for Siri to become capable of “weaving a needle” through all the hoops of app intents will enable Apple Intelligence to get things done for you just by asking for it to be done. “We had that type of approach prototyped, but we used libraries because we did not have a concept of app intents,” he said. 

Apple Intelligence’s LLMs used with Omni Automation lets you use those AI tools from within your own tasks. None of which would be possible without Apple Silicon. “It takes a lot of processing power to handle the myriad calculations required,” he said.

“This is already building a really great foundation for creating self your own set of intelligence tools that keep data with you. My data isn’t passed to any third party — it stays on my machine, and I can use it as I need to.”

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

Source:: Computer World

People implored Microsoft to continue Windows 10 support. Even my frenemy Ed Bott, the noted Windows expert, thinks that when it comes to Windows 10 support, “Microsoft appears to have no empathy” for its individual users. 

Those pleas fell upon deaf ears. On Oct. 14, Windows 10 support ended for most users. 

Now, what are the approximately 400 million Windows 10 users — 40% of all Windows users — to do? Well, some are biting the bullet and buying new Windows 11 PCs or subscribing to Windows 365 cloud PCs. IDC claims PC sales jumped 9.4% year-over-year in the last quarter.  

But businesses have been slow to update their existing machines. As Omdia reported, even though we’ve known this has been coming for years, only 39% of surveyed businesses as of September had refreshed or updated their PCs. Indeed, 18% said they’ll keep using Windows 10.

Why? There are many reasons. First and foremost, users simply don’t see any advantage to switching from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Their attitude can be summed up as, “It works fine, why should I replace it?” In addition, many people loathe Windows 11. 

How much do they hate it? The UX/UI design agency Tenscope found in its analysis of Google Trends data that US searches for “hate Windows 11” and “when does Windows 12 come out” have both spiked over the past 30 days. Jovan Babovic, a Tenscope spokesperson, explained: “The fact that people are already searching for Windows 12 before Windows 11 has gained widespread acceptance shows just how resistant users are to changes they didn’t ask for.”

Oh? Windows 12? The beta should have been out by now. It’s not. I and others think you can might see Windows 12 in 2027. Or, as I’ve long thought, Microsoft might well go all-in on remote Windows on Azure. Your PC will only serve as a launching platform for your “desktop.”

Of course, you don’t have to move to Windows 11. For $61 per Windows 10 PC, Microsoft offers its Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for an additional year of support. The program will be in place for three years, with the yearly cost doubling every 12 months, reaching $244 per PC in the final year. 

That comes on top of annual price hikes for Microsoft 365 (M365) subscriptions. M365 Personal jumped from $69.99 to $99.99 per year, while the Family plan rose from $99.99 to $129.99 per year. For business customers, a 5% hike was also applied to monthly subscriptions under annual commitments starting April 1, 2025, alongside increases for specific services: for example, Teams Phone rose by 25% and Power BI Pro by 40%. These increases are largely tied to the introduction of new AI-powered features, notably Microsoft Copilot, whether users wanted them or not. 

In short, Microsoft services have gotten much more expensive, and users aren’t seeing much benefit for those higher bills. 

Many people and businesses are stuck with Windows 10 PCs that work just fine, even if they are a little long in the tooth. They hate the idea of trashing machines that have years of life left in them and spending money on new hardware.

There are ways to try to upgrade even “incompatible” PCs from Windows 10 to 11. In my experience, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But it’s worth a try, if you have time to spare. All you’ll lose is a system otherwise destined for the trash.

Or you can do what I recommend: get off Windows once and for all and move to Linux desktop. (Yes, I know Apple is another option.) Despite what you might think, Linux has been easy to use for more than a decade now. Sure, it helps to know your way around the Bash shell. But, hey, it helps to know your way around PowerShell on Windows — and how many of us know how to do that? Not knowing PowerShell never stopped you from getting your work done on a Windows PC, did it? It’s the same with the Linux desktop. (Personally, I recommend Linux Mint; I’ve even detailed  how you can give your old Windows 10 box a new lease on life with Linux.

Still nervous about moving to Linux? OK, do you know how to use the Chrome web browser? Yes? Can you do most of your work from a web browser? Then, instead of Linux, give your Windows 10 PC  a refresh with ChromeOS Flex.

ChromeOS Flex turns your PC or laptop into a Chromebook. True, you can’t run your standalone Windows programs on it, but it has no trouble with Microsoft 365 and essentially all other Software-as-a-Service applications. The installation is simple, and if you know how to use a web browser, which you must since you’re reading this article, you can use ChromeOS Flex. 

One advantage of either Linux or ChromeOS Flex is that you won’t need to worry about your PC going out of date. Heck, Linux only recently stopped supporting 486 chips! 

Whatever you decide, you can’t just sit there and run Windows 10 and expect everything to continue as usual. You’d be a fool to do so. Take Windows 7, for example. The WannaCry ransomware attack occurred before Windows 7’s official end-of-support in January 2020, but its effects persist even today, as not quite 10% of Windows users are still running Windows 7. 

You do not want to be that person in your company. 

Decide what you’re going to do and do it soon. I’d prefer you move to Linux or Chrome OS Flex, but do something. Sitting on your hands is not the answer.

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai Wordle is the super fun game from the NYT, where you put your vocabulary to the…
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