High-end computer mice can be used to eavesdrop on the voice conversations of nearby PC users, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have shown in a new proof-of-concept demonstration.

Given the catchy name ‘Mic-E-Mouse’ (Microphone-Emulating Mouse), the ingenious technique outlined in Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors is based on the discovery that some optical mice pick up incredibly small sound vibrations reaching them through the desk surfaces on which they are being used.

These vibrations could then be captured by different types of software on PC, Mac or Linux computers, including non-privileged ‘user space’ programs such as web browsers or games engines or, failing that, privileged components at OS kernel level.

Source:: Computer World

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IT services are changing. Their future will be defined by extensibility via APIs and artificial intelligence. It appears we’re moving toward a post-app digital economy, where personalization takes precedence over off-the shelf solutions. 

That seemed to be the message from Jamf at its 16th annual Jamf Nation User Conference (JNUC) in Denver, CO, where the company unveiled a new API ecosystem, AI capabilities, and automated software updates powered by Apple’s Declarative Device Management (DDM).

“This year marks a major evolution in how customers engage with Jamf,” Jamf CEO John Strosahl said in a statement. “These capabilities make it easier than ever for organizations to fully realize the potential of the Apple ecosystem — with features that matter, integrate seamlessly, and work the way customers need them to.”

When device management gets smarter

The company says these APIs should help its platform become a dynamic and flexible foundation for innovation. In essence, it means developers, admins, and security teams can use Jamf’s APIs to streamline automation, ease integration, and help manage/secure Apple devices at scale.

The idea is that organizations using the Platform APIs can build management tools personalized for the needs of their specific environment. This could be of use to IT and security teams building custom workflows as well as helping technology partners seeking to extend what Jamf can do with their own products and services. MacPaw is at JNUC to show how CleanMyMac Business already benefits from Jamf integration.

There seems to be an emerging rule that nothing in tech can be said unless there’s some mention of artificial intelligence, and Jamf is keeping to that exhortation. The company gave security protection an AI boost with Security Skill in Jamf Protect. It’s an AI assistant designed to help security teams by analyzing telemetry and events logs to provide plain-language incident guidance they can use, hopefully accelerating response. 

An extra security AI agent

“By simplifying complex frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK and CVE references into actionable insights, the new capability enables security teams to cut through alert fatigue and focus on what matters most,” said Jamf.

The company shared initial reactions to the new solution at JNUC, stressing that the tool was delivering real solutions to real problems. In one example, Jamf demonstrated an AI analysis of a Time Stamping security alert. The AI considered the alert, analyzed it, and provided remediation in just seconds for IT. The feature is expected to arrive later this year. Jamf also confirmed it is using AI across the company to help build code and run operations — even turning to autonomous code agents.

“Every efficiency we bring with AI translates into productivity enhancements for you,” a Jamf executive told the audience of Apple admins. “This is enterprise AI done right.”

API, AI, and…DDM 

Declarative Device Management was always described as being the future of device management on Apple; now, it’s become part of the present. Jamf introduced Blueprints at JNUC 2024 and has now extended this support with new DDM-based workflows, including automated software update settings declarations; they basically let a managed device handle its own system updates based on policies defined by IT. This automates one of the pain points of managing Apple fleets and reduces the need for oversight through better automation. 

Digital everything

Reading between the lines of Jamf’s news from its show, it seems the company hopes to provide customers with the kind of extensibility they seek alongside the rock-solid platform security Jamf helps provide. 

The question is, as device management services become API-driven, at what point might some IT admins migrate to open-source alternatives, which also provide opportunities to build a new approach? 

Jamf, of course, can point to the market-tested resilience of its own platforms in contrast to other approaches. But there’s little doubt this will be part of the discussion in this part of the Apple industry over the coming months – especially since open source MDM provider Fleet cast some shade over the Jamf event. The latter has now become the biggest single sponsor of the largest IT group in the industry, the Mac Admins Foundation. Of course, the growing competition in the space reflects the extent to which the Apple-in-the-enterprise world is growing.

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Source:: Computer World

Imagine a city hub where a multitude of AI agents can gather, interact, and converse. Office workers are more like sentries — seeing and interacting with the information generated by agents at the hub.

Buses move information from various “neighborhoods” to the city hub, where workers can build AI agents and skills, and use productivity applications that leverage the growing knowledge base. Those sources could be from Slack, Microsoft or even legacy systems.

That’s how Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder of DevRev, described “Computer,” which his company unveiled last month. (Pandey previously co-founded and served as CEO of Nutanix.)

“We are the bus,” Pandey said in referencing the enterprise integration approach. The “bus” term is also a reference to Tibco’s service bus, which did bidirectional data transfers between data sources.

DevRev’s Computer aims to bring connective tissue to disparate systems, effectively unlocking previously unused data — generally referred to as unstructured data — and delivering new context to the information used by companies to make key decisions.

“What you build on top of all of this is basically agents and skills. We also build apps,” Pandey said. 

Those insights are made accessible to office workers through a conversational user interface. The DevRev stack adds more context through its own reasoning, indexing, and data processing.

“Computer…unifies both structured and unstructured data with extreme depth of organization to eliminate these silos and give AI agents full context,” Pandey said.

Box, Microsoft and Google in the last year have released AI features that can conduct deep research and add context to unstructured data. Those companies are plugging AI features into their legacy strengths in storage and productivity. 

DevRev’s Computer functionality goes beyond simple systems integration, Pandey said. “We like to take the agent approach before we go to the apps. We are the only AI company that can replace apps as well,” Pandey said.

Pandey described Computer as a kind of Switzerland where all AI offerings are treated equally. There is no lock-in to specific platforms or data sources, where only a limited amount of data is shared between systems. It provides a platform where workers can draw input from all data.

DevRev’s Computer creates its own knowledge graph from the information transported by the bus to the city hub. The goal is to turn “enterprise data into like a living network that maps complex relationships between teams, customers and products,” Pandey said.

A technology called AirSync is a key component powering the technology. It is a bidirectional synchronization technology that moves information back and forth from various systems to feed the AI-native knowledge graph.

Workers build agents that access the hub through a search engine, a SQL engine, and an MCP (Model Context Protocol) gateway. Orchestrators continuously extract and load data from external systems, while agents apply reasoning to automate workflows and present information to users through a conversational interface.

“The SQL engine runs on users’ devices at the edge, enabling fast queries without relying on cloud infrastructure. That’s a design choice that makes the system more affordable and responsive,” Pandey said.

Workers need to invoke workflows via large language models (LLMs) through an engine that’s being published through MCP.  “Basically you’re taking all your automations and annotating them, labeling them, and really publishing it through the MCP protocol,” Pandey said.

For customers, it takes just “seven lines of code” to deploy Computer into a web portal or application.

“Our customer’s employees will use this through a desktop app. It will auto-upgrade whenever it has to. It basically starts with a search bar. And the search bar eventually becomes a ChatGPT-like interface.”

APIs connect to existing systems, and DevRev’s marketplace already has many connectors built in. “Once they have deployed the marketplace connectors, everything just flows in,” Pandey explained.

The product name “Computer” was inspired by Peter Drucker’s 1967 article “The Manager and the Moron.”  (In the article, the moron caricature was a computer.)

“In 1967, he was conceiving what the computer could do,” Pandey said. “And we said, look, we can look at this as a more intelligent computer. It’s a more intelligent moron, but it’s not here to take your job.” 

Source:: Computer World

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With the annual Jamf Nation User Conference (JNUC) taking place this week in Denver, we can expect more news about Apple in the enterprise. The event, which has become a traditional launching pad for Apple/enterprise news announcements, is expected to attract Apple IT pros from around the world, as it does each year.

What to expect at the show? That’s not always predictable. After all, who else remembers when then-IBM CTO (now Cisco CIO) Fletcher Previn finally proved Macs are cheaper to run and more productive to use when deployed at scale? 

Changing enterprise tech, one seat at a time

Not every announcement can be as significant as that one six years ago, but the event is always proof positive of Apple’s growing status in business. That growth is beyond skin deep, with recent analyst reports showing that Apple’s Mac sales are rising at the highest rate in the business. 

Amid all these changes, one thing taking place is a steady proliferation of device management and security companies aimed at the Apple-in-the-enterprise ecosystem. That’s great, as it means there is a plethora of alternatives, each offering something that might be a useful answer to the needs of your business; it also means that side of the Apple environment is becoming more competitive.

The growing Apple enterprise ecosystem

We’re bound to hear more partnership news from JNUC. For example, last week we learned about an integration between Parallels and Jamf Marketplace that will make it much easier to migrate Windows-based businesses to Macs by supporting easy deployment of Windows as virtual machines. Just two weeks ago, we learned of a similar arrangement between Jamf and automated support system Moveworks. More recentl,y Ukrainian developer MacPaw, announced a similar partnership for the deployment of optimization and then automation tool CleanMyMac Business.

These and many other partnerships effectively turn Jamf Marketplace into a useful enterprise-focused Apple App Store. (We’ll also likely learn more about the work Jamf has been doing with Managed Service Providers and channel partners.)

Not just who does it, but what we do

Like so much of Apple’s enterprise story across the last decade, it’s not just the wider business-focused Apple ecosystem that’s expanded, it’s also the scope of what’s happening in the space. 

One way to reflect on this is to consider the number of sessions made available at JNUC 2025 compared to the same event a decade ago; while that one had “over 40” sessions, this year’s expo hosts 162 of them. And, of course, the company’s offer is also mutating from a one-size-fits-all application approach to more AI-friendly services and services access tools and solutions.

That’s a clear reflection of the increasing depth to which Macs, iPhones, iPads, and the rest are proliferating in business. Logically, the more deployments occur, the more questions need to be resolved — and that’s reflected in the number of answers available at JNUC 2025. The growth in Apple’s enterprise status is also reflected in the growing number of security products and services made available for the platform.

While the platform remains inherently far more secure than anything else, that doesn’t mean it can be left unsecured, particularly for business users — especially as ill-informed authoritarian governments erode digital security with a war on encryption.

More players, more games, more competition

Jamf might have been the first big hitter to emerge from the evolution, but it’s by no means alone: Moysle, Addigy, Fleet, Kandji, Hexnode and others — including Microsoft InTune — are all growing in the space. 

Apple recently reflected this growing complexity when it introduced tools to make it easier to migrate between MDM systems. It means IT can more easily move between device management systems than before, useful for price negations and takeovers when two MDM systems become one.

They say competition is a good thing, but it may not always be the case. After all, in a tech market driven by the needs of big business, competition may lead to consolidation, changing the offer even while the names remain the same. It’s certain whispers on the JNUC show floor will reflect that, given recent speculation that Jamf might be up for sale. That will matter to the JNUC “vibe,” which has for years been renowned for being the most Macworld Expo-like jamboree in the business. Will that side of the corporate culture pay the price of any such sale? Or will an acquisition, if there is any truth to those rumors, help accelerate the evolution of the Apple-based enterprise by giving Jamf additional resources to scale?

Perhaps we’ll find out during the JNUC keynote on Tuesday. 

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Source:: Computer World

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Even without the latest monthly jobs report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics because of the US government shutdown, other sources made one thing clear: employers are still making cuts and remain reticent to hire.

Private employers shed 32,000 jobs in September, according to a report from global HR and payroll solutions provider ADP.

Pay gains were largely unchanged for those who retained their jobs at 4.4% year-over-year; pay gains for people who changed jobs last quarter were 6.6%. 

“Despite the strong economic growth we saw in the second quarter, this month’s release further validates what we’ve been seeing in the labor market, that U.S. employers have been cautious with hiring,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist.

Larger employers (with more than 500 workers) were more apt to hire than mid-size and smaller organizations, according to ADP’s data. Large companies in the US hired 33,000 people in September, while mid-sized firms (with 50-499 employees) let 20,000 workers go and small companies (fewer than 50 employees) let go of 40,000 workers.

One bright spot for hiring was “knowledge workers,” which includes technologists. Hiring of those workers increased by 3,000 last month. Education and health services jobs also saw significant gains, as 33,000 new workers were hired.

ADP

A ‘market under pressure’

Ger Doyle, regional president for ManpowerGroup in North America, described the hiring-firing shift as “a pivot” and “not a pause.”

“September reveals a market under pressure, with signs of continued softness,” he said. “Even without today’s BLS report, the labor market isn’t silent; it’s speaking through real-time signals. The labor market is reshaping in real time, and opportunity lies in how organizations reimagine entry points, invest in internal mobility, and build their workforces for what comes next.”

Hiring is slowing, with new job postings totaling 2.04 million, down 8% month over month and at their lowest level since December 2022, according to Doyle. Open roles have dropped to 6.86 million, down 10% — their lowest point in four years.

“September, typically a turning point for the labor market, hasn’t brought the lift we expected,” Doyle said.

Through ongoing surveys, ADP measures “employee sentiment” or how people think and feel about their jobs and employers. Its latest data showed knowledge workers’ motivation, in particular, remains high. In September, that motivation score climbed one point to 136, a sixth straight record high.

“People are holding onto their jobs and appear motivated to work,” said Mary Hayes, director of People and Performance at ADP Research.

Companies are shifting focus inward, with more employees staying put and internal moves up 11% year-over-year. External hiring is down, signaling a growing emphasis on career development and lateral mobility, ManpowerGroup’s data revealed.

Skills vs. resumes

The World Economic Forum predicts that while 92 million jobs will be displaced globally by 2030, 170 million new ones will be created. That’s why companies must shift to skills-based hiring rather than relying solely on resumes, according to Sibyl McCarley, Chief People Officer at HR tech provider Hirevue.

When considering new hires, 80% of corporate executives will prioritize skills over degrees, with half planning to increase freelance hiring this year to close the gap in AI and other skills, according to a new study from freelancing platform Upwork.

“When roles emerge that didn’t exist five years ago, past job titles alone won’t tell you who’s qualified,” McCarley said. “Organizations that embrace this forward-looking approach will be better positioned to compete. That being said, we are seeing reductions in entry-level positions that are instead being fulfilled by artificial intelligence [AI].”

Many organizations, she said, are now weighing AI as an alternative to workers before backfilling roles. While the larger impact is still limited, each lost job is personal and leaders must respond with empathy, she said. If AI-driven displacement accelerates, there need to be serious strategies in place to support those affected, McCarley said.

Broader economic forces, such as President Donald J. Trump’s tariffs, policy uncertainty, and the rising cost of capital investments, are contributing to workforce disruption, McCarley added.

Ben Johnston, COO of small business lender Kapitus, said US businesses are grappling with tariffs that raise costs on imported goods, potentially making domestic manufacturing more competitive long term. But in the short term, those tariffs risk driving up inflation and disrupting global supply chains, threatening jobs across the manufacturing, wholesale, and retail sectors.

AI is also beginning to displace workers, especially in white-collar jobs. Companies are currently investing heavily in AI technologies that can analyze data and quickly make decisions that once could only be made by humans, Johnston said.

Companies are using AI to gather and analyze data from the web, internal systems, and third parties — tasks once done only by humans — mainly in white-collar roles like analytics and underwriting. And as robotics advance, AI could soon take on physical tasks in blue-collar jobs like driving, factory work, and even home healthcare, Johnston noted.

ManpowerGroup’s Doyle agreed, saying as roles evolve, especially under the influence of AI and automation, the expectations for entry-level talent are changing.

“The ability to orchestrate, adapt, and work alongside emerging technologies is becoming a baseline requirement,” he said. “For many, the first step into the workforce now looks very different than it did even a year ago.”

Source:: Computer World

In what may be a defining move for enterprise tech purchasers seeking a smooth way to manage a welcome migration from Windows to Apple, Parallels Desktop has rolled out integration with Apple-focused mobile device management provider Jamf Pro.

Parallels Desktop is a market-leading emulator for macOS that lets you run genuine instances of Windows (and other operating systems) on your Mac. The virtualization is rock solid, regularly updated, and improves each year. 

The fastest version of Windows runs on a Mac

Cast your mind back a couple of years and you might recall that the development team behind Parallels was astonished when Apple introduced the first Macs to use Apple Silicon; they found Windows virtual machines ran faster on those Macs than Windows itself runs on some PCs. One tester went on the record to say running Windows for ARM on an M1 Mac using Parallels Desktop 16 was “the fastest version of Windows” they’d ever used at the time.

The combination lets you use a Mac to run and access nearly all those legacy Windows services that have locked you into those systems for years. This can help organizations close a major gap: supporting employee preference for Macs, while still delivering essential Windows applications without the compliance or security headaches.

What does the integration mean?

The tie-up between Jamf Pro and Parallels answers that pain point, and makes it easier to automate deployment and updates, reclaim licenses when devices are reassigned, and apply consistent security and compliance policies across both macOS and Windows environments. 

What that means, really, is that enterprises working with both platforms — or actively migrating to Mac — can bridge many of the annoying problems found when moving between the platforms. Because Macs run Windows, too.

So, what does this integration provide?

You can deploy Parallels Desktop from within Jamf Pro’s built-in App Catalog.

IT can pair deployment with configuration profiles, which means you can automate license key provisions — so those Windows licenses can go to those who need them, rather than sitting around gathering update fees while contributing little else.

You gain compliance tools, including standards alignment from the console and granular control over updates, access, and data sharing with enforced security policies.

And, of course, Declarative Device Management on the Mac adds yet another layer of protection across your systems.

Once you have Windows working on virtual machines on a Mac, you also gain a more secure computing experience, in part because even if the Windows volume succumbs to one of the many viruses that infest that platform, your Mac volume will take the strain. But with Parallels’ management portal, IT can keep a beady eye on the condition of all the installs, helping ensure consistency, compliance and early warning of any vulnerabilities.

What next?

I’m the AppleHolic so of course I see major merits in this offer. To my mind, it supports the ongoing momentum in the Apple-in-the-enterprise space, an environment now seeing an acceleration in the adoption of Macs.

The great thing about the combination of Jamf and Parallels is that the move brings together two trusted names in the macOS space, combining virtualization and device management expertise in a good way. And while the combo can’t claim to counter every argument against wider Mac adoption, it’s certain to help convince some business customers they can migrate, the support to do so exists, and many legacy apps and services can come along for the ride — pending their inevitable replacement by cross-platform, mobile-friendly alternatives.

What’s behind all of this is momentum, in part built around Apple Silicon. The decision to put M-series chips inside Macs continues to pay big dividends, and these systems have enough power to handle running Windows alongside the host Mac OS. It means that if your employees would prefer to run Macs instead of Windows, they can do so. And in combination with Jamf Pro, your IT team might eventually recognize that, just like when iPod came to Windows, the combination of Mac, Parallels, and Jamf is a glass of water in the enterprise computing desert.

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Source:: Computer World

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The authoritarian, surveillance-loving UK Labour government remains deeply committed to magical thinking, slamming yet another encryption-busting “Technical Capability Notice” (TCN) on Apple, according to the Financial Times. 

The difference is that this time it says it only wants to damage the privacy and security of the UK’s subject population. “The UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a back door into its cloud storage service, this time targeting only British users’ data,” the FT reported.

It’s not over till it’s over

Snap back in time and you’ll recall the UK Home Office secretly demanded that Apple create a worldwide back door into encrypted iCloud data. Apple responded by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection service from the UK market and opposing the request in a top-secret UK court. The original order also extended to users outside the UK, so the government also faced opposition from privacy and free speech advocates and the US government as the move trampled on the Constitutional rights of US citizens. 

The latter seemed to have an impact. 

In the end, we believed the UK had pulled back, particularly as its overreach was deeply dangerous, would invite imitation from other repressive governments, and would deeply damage data security with the potential to undermine international business transactions. 

The widely understood argument is that if one back door exists, every hacker, surveillance fetishist, tech-addicted stalker, criminal, gangster, or enemy nation would spend vast resources locating that door and exploiting it.

Anyone, absolutely anyone, who has any insight into how digital communications works will tell you the same thing. Any weakening of encryption opens a Pandora’s box of harms and will not keep you safe.

UK.gov wants all your data

Unfortunately, the Keir Starmer government is big on hyperbole and short on sense, so the Home Office has returned to the fray, filing a September TCN insisting Apple build encryption back doors that only target UK subjects. 

It can make this egregious request because the subjects of the UK crown have no constitutional rights to protect them, (despite much-repeated hokum concerning the Magna Carta) and US politicians are unlikely to care so long as US citizens aren’t affected by the rule. 

The thing is, technically it’s impossible. There is no real way to create a back door or to weaken encryption of UK user’s data that does not also impact others — if nothing else, the existence of that door means it will be abused, and digital criminals are quite sufficiently well-resourced to find that weakness, exploit, and extend it. Just look at the existence of the highly profitable surveillance-as-a-service “industry” for proof. In other words, the UK’s demand still undermines the rights enjoyed by US users. 

Dangerous overreach

The other thing is that the UK plan can’t work. Anyone who understands technology and values data privacy will simply add additional encryption to the files they store online, using tools like Cryptomator. That means the only people who will be affected by the rule will be ordinary folk, rather than criminals. That suggests the UK agenda is not about crime prevention, but more likely concerned with wider exploitation of the data made available. Such intentions don’t appear to have been discussed in public, which hints the UK public would probably reject them if it knew. 

That’s the worst thing about the UK’s determination to continue down this dangerous road; not only is it refusing to listen to common sense about the dangers of weakening data protection, but it is also making moves that would be unpopular with no transparency at all. 

For the government, the danger here is that it will be remembered for putting in place the mechanism for dangerous authoritarianism (including Digital ID) without scrutiny, transparency, or legal recourse. 

What Apple said

In a statement provided to Computerworld, an Apple spokesperson said: “Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature.

“ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices. We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before. Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the UK.

“As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services, and we never will.”

What the UK said

The UK Home Office told the FT that it does not comment on such matters, including, “for example,” confirming or denying the existence of any such notices. “We will always take all actions necessary at the domestic level to keep UK citizens safe,” it said. 

Except, of course, in this case its actions will not keep UK citizens safe, leaving their data at risk and potentially impacting the entire digital value chain — all without transparency, discussion, or public mandate.

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Source:: Computer World