By Ana-Maria Stanciuc As Europe races into the AI era, its policymakers are laying new pipes for the continent’s digital future. The European Commission’s proposed Digital Networks Act (DNA) promises to rewire the EU’s telecom landscape, with big implications for artificial intelligence infrastructure, connectivity equity, and the startup ecosystem.  Exposed as part of a broader push to make Europe “fit for the Digital Age,” the draft law aims to modernize how networks are built and regulated, from 5G towers in rural villages to fiber links between data centers.  I have to say it’s a bold vision of a more connected, innovative Europe, but…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Manisha Priyadarshini Rokid has launched its AI Glasses Style at $299, positioning them as a lighter, screenless, and more affordable alternative to Meta Ray-Ban glasses while focusing on voice-first AI features like translation and assistance.
The post Rokid’s AI glasses offer a more affordable route to wearables than Meta Ray-Ban appeared first on Digital Trends.

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By Deepti Pathak Uma Racing is a community-created racing game, inspired by the popular Uma Musume universe. Uma Racing…
The post Uma Racing Codes (January 2026) appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Varun Mirchandani Apple may be working on an AirTag-sized AI wearable with built-in cameras, microphones, and a new Siri chatbot.
The post Forget the watch, Apple’s AI Pin might be its next wearable move appeared first on Digital Trends.

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OpenAI has adding age verification to ChatGPT following reports that several children and young people have taken their own lives after conversations with the popular chatbot. The move echoes a recent decision by TikTok to do the same thing to protect underage users from accessing inappropriate content.

ChatGPT already has restrictions for users who state that they are under 18. Unsurprisingly, there are users who lie about their age in order to discuss sensitive topics. What’s new is that OpenAI is now adding algorithms to detect when someone lies about their age. In such cases, the restrictions will be imposed automatically.

If the algorithm draws the wrong conclusion about age, users can reset their account by uploading a photograph of themselves, according to Techcrunch.

Source:: Computer World

By Omair Khaliq Sultan Most smartwatch upgrades are about nicer screens and slightly faster chips. The Ultra is different. It’s the Apple Watch people buy when they want the best version of the idea: tougher build, bigger presence on the wrist, and a battery that’s better suited to long days. The Apple Watch Ultra 2 (GPS + Cellular) is […] The post The “do-it-all” Apple Watch Ultra 2 is $200 off, and it’s the one people keep for years appeared first on Digital Trends.

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It’s becoming increasingly common for companies and organizations to be reported for violations of the GDPR personal data protection law, according to a new report from the DLA Piper law firm. On average, there are now 443 reports of GDPR violations per day in the EU, an increase of 22% compared to 2024.

“The report confirms that cybersecurity issues are intensifying,” Gustav Lundin from DLA Piper said in a statement. “For Swedish organizations, this means that both technical and organizational protective measures need to be reviewed in order to keep pace with the emerging risks and requirements.”

In 2025, total fines amounted to €1.2 billion, most of which involved technology and social media companies. That figure was in line with the previous year.

Source:: Computer World

By Ana-Maria Stanciuc Berlin’s energy transition sector got a defining boost today as Cloover, a climate fintech based in Berlin, announced it has secured more than $1.2 billion in total capital commitments, combining Series A equity and a substantial debt facility to accelerate the rollout of its software and financing platform across Europe. The financing package includes €18.8 million (approximately $22 million) in Series A equity, led by MMC Ventures and QED Investors, with participation from Lowercarbon Capital, BNVT Capital, Bosch Ventures, Centrotec, and Earthshot Ventures. Alongside that, a €1.02 billion debt facility provided by a major European bank will be deployed directly…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Cezar Nitulescu To many readers, this may sound like a paradox: how can knowledge ever become invaluable? In this article, I want to explore how corporate knowledge, when poorly structured and rigidly transferred, can slowly transform from an asset into a disadvantage. Not only for companies, but especially for employees. And over time, that disadvantage compounds. The journey usually looks familiar. You apply for a job, speak with a recruiter, send your CV, go through interviews, and eventually receive the green-light email: “Congratulations, you’re hired.” This moment takes us directly to the real turning point: the onboarding process. Those first one, two,…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai BGMI is one of the most popular battle royale games because of its exciting gameplay and…
The post BGMI Redeem Codes For Today: January 21 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Shikhar Mehrotra After years of lagging behind rivals, Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant is getting a much-needed brain transplant with AI from Perplexity.
The post Samsung announces the new avatar of Bixby with Perplexity power (and then deletes the post) appeared first on Digital Trends.

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By Ana-Maria Stanciuc In a Davos dominated by talk of tariffs, subsidies, and geopolitical risk, Europe used the stage to question its own economic limits. At the World Economic Forum, Ursula von der Leyen put forward one of the clearest signals yet that the European Union is preparing a structural shift in how it treats business, competitiveness, and economic power.  The phrase that stuck, “Europe Inc”, is not the name of a regulation, nor a new Brussels invention ready to roll out. It is a political framing for a shift that the European Commission wants to accelerate. What Europe Inc actually refers to…This story continues at The Next Web

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Four out of five employees believe artificial intelligence will affect their daily work tasks, according to a new global survey by staffing and recruitment company Randstad. The survey found that Generation Z workers are the most concerned group, while baby boomers feel more secure and adaptable, according to Reuters.

Demand for jobs requiring so-called AI agent skills has risen sharply, up 1,587%, while AI and automation are increasingly replacing simpler, routine roles.

Almost half of employees surveyed fear that AI primarily benefits companies more than workers. There is also an optimism gap: 95% of employers expect to see growth this year, compared to 51% of employees who feel the same way.

Randstad’s survey is based on responses from 27,000 employees and 1,225 employers, as well as an analysis of more than 3 million job ads in 35 countries.

Source:: Computer World

By Omair Khaliq Sultan Earbuds are one of those purchases where the wrong pair annoys you every single day—bad fit, flaky connection, weak call quality, or sound that feels thin. That’s why price matters, but so does buying from a brand that actually cares about audio. The Sennheiser ACCENTUM True Wireless earbuds are $119.99, saving you $100 off the […] The post The easiest audio upgrade: these Sennheiser earbuds are $100 off appeared first on Digital Trends.

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Highly confidential information concerning Apple, the company’s business practices, and designs has allegedly been hacked in a ransomware attack against a key Apple partner, Luxshare Precision Industry.

The attacking group is called RansomHub, which claims to have purloined product data, confidential design files (including 3D CAD models), and personally identifiable employee information in the heist. The group is threatening to leak this information unless a ransom is paid. It also said it gathered equally sensitive information concerning Nvidia and LG during the attack. 

None of the concerned parties have confirmed the claims. 

Who is Luxshare?

Luxshare assembles iPhones, AirPods and is the exclusive manufacturer of the Vision Pro. The Apple business is lucrative, generating around 70% of the company’s income, and Luxshare is also reported to have been signed up to make OpenAI’s hardware devices.

To some extent, it doesn’t matter whether the attack took place or not, because the story underlines one of the biggest weaknesses every company and every person faces in the digital world: you, your data and your business partner’s data are only ever as secure as your least secure partner.

That’s a fact that needs to be mulled over, particularly as a deeply unstable political environment means the profile of those carrying out these attacks is also changing. Attacks are sophisticated, follow complex attack vectors, can be financed by nation states, and can comprise multiple stages. “The total number of data breaches more than tripled between 2013 and 2022,” Apple said a couple of years ago.

An attack against a single employee can be part of a multi-pronged assault on the protections of your key business partners.

Digital war zone

Charl van der Walt, head of security research for Orange Cyberdefense, warns: “We exist within a dense web of interdependence where a single weakness can enable mass compromise. Small businesses and critical services have become prime conduits to amplify economic and social consequences.”

This isn’t the first time a partner in the Apple — or any — space has been attacked. Apple partner Quanta was hit by ransomware in 2021. In recent years, we’ve seen a scourge of mercenary spyware. Just today, Jamf Threat Labs published a report exploring a DPRK-linked campaign that uses malicious GitHub repositories to deliver macOS malware through Visual Studio Code. 

(Jamf claims to have uncovered a JavaScript-based backdoor that provides remote code execution, persistent communication with command-and-control infrastructure and system fingerprinting on macOS systems.)

The data shows us that the security environment is increasingly difficult.

Supply chains are under attack

The latest edition of Orange Cyberdefense’s annual Security Navigator report confirms the number of cyber extortion attacks has trebled since 2020, with parts of the supply chain — such as Luxshare — a particular target for such attacks. The group behind this attack is known to be one of the most active ransomware gangs around and primarily targets industrial manufacturing and healthcare. A CISA advisory tells us the group successfully breached around 210 targets in 2024 alone. 

To protect themselves, enterprises must implement multi-layered, defense-in-depth protections, harden their endpoints, and use integrated management and security tools to ensure visibility across all potential attack vectors.

More than the OS

Part of this involves the operating system, of course, and Apple has always managed to provide that. (We don’t know whether the Luxshare systems that were attacked involved Macs, but I’m willing to bet they were not.)

At a system level, Apple continues to invest in security across its systems, with tools like Lockdown Mode, Threat notifications, XProtect, Gatekeeper, and regular system patches helping keep its ecosystem secure. But the claimed attack against a key Apple business partner illustrates that relying solely on operating system safety isn’t enough; it’s vitally important that any company put protections in place.

Too many enterprises don’t do this. For example, just two years ago we learned that firewalls are disabled on 55% of Macs being used in businesses, while one in 20 devices has vulnerable applications installed. Apple’s recent decision to begin to push out essential security updates to users could not be better timed.

If it can happen at Luxshare…

As for the unfortunate incident at Luxshare, while it is too early to read too much into it, I think it likely that a combination of human error, and at least one unpatched vulnerability, potentially at a partner company, enabled the exploit to occur. If it can happen to a large and powerful company like Luxshare, it can certainly happen elsewhere; you must take precautions.

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Source:: Computer World

By Tom Bedford One of CES 2026’s big robotics releases is a new robotic control suit from Daimon Robotics.
The post Daimon Robotics’ new data acquisition system brings haptic intelligence to robot teleoperation appeared first on Digital Trends.

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By Pranob Mehrotra Samsung could soon introduce updates for the Galaxy Ring’s connectivity notifications to offer users more relevant information.
The post Samsung might soon call you out if you leave your Galaxy Ring disconnected for too long appeared first on Digital Trends.

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By Ana-Maria Stanciuc Belgian business software company Odoo, also a unicorn, has reached a fresh milestone. Growth investor General Atlantic has increased its stake in the firm, buying additional shares from regional backer Wallonie Entreprendre and pushing Odoo’s valuation to roughly €7 billion.  This move isn’t a typical funding round where a company raises new capital. Instead, it’s a secondary transaction: General Atlantic bought existing shares that were previously held by Wallonie Entreprendre, the investment arm of Belgium’s Walloon region. After the deal, Wallonie Entreprendre still holds about 3 % of the company.  Odoo was founded in 2002 in Belgium and has grown steadily…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Deepti Pathak Infinix has officially launched the Note Edge, a new smartphone designed to offer a premium look…
The post Infinix Launches Note Edge With MediaTek Dimensity 7100 & 6,500mAh Battery appeared first on Fossbytes.

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Google’s Mandiant security division has come up with an unusual tactic to persuade organizations to stop using the aged and hugely insecure NTLMv1 authentication protocol: publish a data lookup that makes cracking NTLMv1 credentials trivial for attackers.

The intention, Mandiant explained, is to draw attention to the fact that, despite decades of evidence that NTLMv1 (NT LAN Manager version 1) is insecure, organizations continue to use it. Anyone can use Mandiant’s Net-NTLMv1 pre-computed rainbow table lookup, downloadable from the Google Cloud Research Dataset portal, to map a given server response to reconstruct a real NT hash.

Hashes, of course, are mathematical representations of real passwords, but are just as useful to criminals when exploited using techniques such as pass-the-hash. The benefit is time and money saved: Mandiant reckons its rainbow table allows the recovery of an NTLMv1 key in 12 hours using a computer costing $600, rather than relying on third party services or expensive hardware to brute-force the keys.

None of this makes NTLMv1 less secure or easier to target than it already is. Mandiant’s hope is that the release of the table will serve as a reminder that the problem exists, prompting organizations to finally rip out NTLMv1 from their networks.

“This legacy protocol leaves organizations vulnerable to trivial credential theft, yet it remains prevalent due to inertia and a lack of demonstrated immediate risk,” the company said in its announcement. “By releasing these tables, Mandiant aims to lower the barrier for security professionals to demonstrate the insecurity of Net-NTLMv1.”

Long fallback

NTLMv1 is a 1990s challenge-response protocol used to authenticate Windows NT users to Active Directory (AD). Based on 1980’s Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption, it was updated to the more secure NTLMv2 in 1996 before being completely replaced by Kerberos. Unfortunately, legacy protocols like NTLMv1 don’t just disappear, and are retained as a fallback in case they are needed by older applications. That fallback has turned out to last decades.

What evidence does Mandiant have that organizations are still using NTLMv1? The first is anecdotal: “Mandiant consultants continue to identify its use in active environments,” the company noted in last week’s announcement.

Secondly, cyberattackers regularly target it. For example, a 2024 campaign by the TA577 threat group targeted NTLM hashes by using booby-trapped emails to send challenge-response authentication requests to internal SMB resources such as legacy printers.  

A more recent incident involved an authentication relay attack aimed at a specific NTLM vulnerability, CVE-2025-54918, which came only weeks after Microsoft announced that it was finally removing NTLMv1 support from Windows Server 2025 and Windows 11.

Primary hurdle: Knowing it’s still there

According to Rob Finn, International vice president at supply chain security company Chainguard, even security-aware organizations could be caught out by NTLMv1.

“Legacy protocols like NTLMv1 are buried deep within third-party firmware. A security team might deprecate NTLMv1 at the OS level, only to have a legacy printer driver or industrial sensor reintroduce it via an unpatched, decades-old library,” he said. “For most companies, the primary hurdle isn’t just knowing NTLMv1 is insecure, it’s knowing that it’s still there.”

Because resources such as printers are not externally exposed, it is tempting to assume they are beyond the reach of attackers. Despite this, NTLMv1 can still be targeted from outside the network using relay or coercion techniques, by, for example, triggering authentication via a phishing attack.

“Attackers don’t need to know you’re using it. They just have to poke the system to find out. Fundamentally, organizations keep legacy protocols active not because they want to, but because they fear breaking a mission-critical legacy app,” said Finn.

Despite Microsoft recommending that organizations upgrade to NTLMv2 and Kerberos for more than two decades, it appears not everyone got the memo. “In crypto terms, NTLMv1 isn’t just old, it’s archaeological,” said Rob Anderson, head of reactive consulting services at Reliance Cyber. “NTLMv1 is still enabled, not because it is needed today, but because it was needed once, and nobody is quite brave enough to turn it off and see what breaks.”

Despite those fears, organizations need to take action. “Scan for its use, find out why it is in use, register it as a high risk and get to work removing it, with achievable deadlines,” he advised.

This article originally appeared on CSOonline.

Source:: Computer World