By Paulo Vargas A new Android app called Nearby Glasses alerts you when someone wearing smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans is nearby by scanning for their Bluetooth signals.
The post Godsend app alerts you of smart glasses that might be secretly recording you appeared first on Digital Trends.

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By Ana-Maria Stanciuc On March 8, 2026, in honour of International Women’s Day, a new edition of SheBuilds on Lovable invited builders from around the world to a 24-hour global, powered by Anthropic. On top of that, participants in the SheBuilds campaign receive $100 in Anthropic API credits and $250 in Stripe fee credits to kickstart their builds […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai Word guessing games like Wordle have exploded in popularity recently, simply because they are fun and…
The post Contexto Hints & Answers for Today: February 25 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Moinak Pal Google has added standalone earthquake alerts to Wear OS, allowing smartwatches to warn users over Wi-Fi or data even when not paired to a phone.
The post Wear OS smartwatches can now deliver earthquake alerts even without a phone appeared first on Digital Trends.

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Illustrating the extent to which it is willing to work with the Trump Administration — and as President Donald J. Trump prepares for tonight’s State of the Union address — Apple now says it will begin to make Mac minis in Houston later this year. The Macs will be made at the same factory where the company now makes server chips.

 “Apple is deeply committed to the future of American manufacturing, and we’re proud to significantly expand our footprint in Houston with the production of Mac mini starting later this year,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “We began shipping advanced AI servers from Houston ahead of schedule, and we’re excited to accelerate that work even further.”

Supporting its own announcement, Apple Chief Operating Officer Sabih Khan also shared the promise during an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We’re very excited to tell you that later this year we will be beginning Mac mini manufacturing right here in this space,” he said.

Khan suggested the new factory will churn out “thousands” of Macs each week.

Apple’s US manufacturing expansion

This decision means Mac mini now becomes the second modern Apple PC to be manufactured in the US, alongside the Mac Pro. The company also makes servers for Private Cloud Compute at the same facility, and intends to expand advanced AI server manufacturing there.

To some extent, the hardware Apple chooses to make in the US likely reflects the complexity and production volume demands of those products. In some cases, Apple cannot make the product because it can’t yet source enough of the highly-skilled people it needs to do so. To solve that problem, Apple is currently investing more than $600 billion, including the creation of an Academy in Detroit. The company is also launching a huge, 20,000-foot advanced manufacturing skills training center near the new Mac mini factory. 

“The dedicated facility will provide hands-on training in advanced manufacturing techniques to students, supplier employees, and American businesses of all sizes,” Apple said.

Creating opportunity in manufacturing

Apple’s US investment plan includes directly hiring 20,000 people over four years, with a focus on R&D, silicon engineering, software development, and AI. Apple has particularly focused its job-reshoring efforts on such high-tech, high-value tasks and revealed it has now sourced more than 20 billion US-made chips from 24 factories across the US for use in its products. 

Third-party partners are all aboard: GlobalWafers has begun production at its new $4 billion bare silicon wafer facility in Sherman, TX. Apple will also purchase 100 million advanced chips produced by TSMC at its new Arizona facility this year.

Each of these investments creates new employment opportunities for US workers, while also protecting some of the highest value components used in Apple devices from tariffs. Every job counts, of course, given that US job creation has slowed to around 15,000 new jobs a month. In that context, the additional employment Apple provides means a lot — particularly as we all now anticipate wide-scale replacement and displacement  of many human employees with smart machines.

Tariffs and their impact

Apple’s promise to bring Mac mini production to the US might or might not be enough to persuade the US government to spare it from some of the tariffs put in place since the courts rejected the earlier tranche. Just like every other enterprise, company leaders will certainly hope for better business stability; Apple has paid more than $3 billion in tariffs since 2025 at a rate of around $1 billion a quarter.

While the truth about these added taxes is that consumers end up paying them on the products they buy, they also create instability and impose pressure on profitability across the entire supply chain, which is bad for business.

Many US brands have leaned on their manufacturing partners to take a haircut on price in order to sustain these tariffs while keeping existing prices, and there’s little reason to think Apple hasn’t done the same thing. That may be fine in the short term, but in the medium/long term, reducing profitability at key suppliers puts their business at risk. This creates a chain of events in which key suppliers cease trading, leaving US companies gasping and grasping for replacements in what becomes a seller’s market.

No matter how challenging the seas become, Apple must navigate them somehow; its current compliance shows it is attempting to do just that, even as it prepares for a changing of the guard of its leadership class. Who and what will the company be tomorrow?

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe. Also, now on Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

For the first time, AWS has confirmed that one of its AI systems did indeed delete and recreate one of its environments in December, shutting down part of that service for about 13 hours. What happened behind the scenes — including an aggressive AWS statement against the media outlet that initially reported the issue — is far more interesting. 

For IT, this raises questions of how users need to interact with AI systems. AI tools and service have today so effectively mastered natural language that people can forget there isn’t a human involved. That can include approving an AI action without insisting on more details.

Consider a human driver inside a self-driving vehicle, such as a Tesla with “full self-driving.” Let’s say the car is driving down a highway at 65 MPH and going around a curve. But instead of following the curve, the vehicle drives straight, plunges through a guardrail — and the car and passenger drop a few hundred feet to their demise. 

In theory, the human driver is in charge and can take back driving control at any point. But if the incident happens with no warning, the driver won’t likely have the half-second needed to resume control in time. Is that the vehicle AI’s fault or is the human to blame for not taking over? 

You could make a legitimate argument that it was absolutely the human’s fault because they never should have trusted the self-driving tech in the first place. 

That brings us to the current state of IT decisions and AI, which in turn brings us back to the December AWS disaster. 

The back-story was broken by the Financial Times, which reported the 13-hour outage was caused by a Kiro agentic coding system that decided to improve operations by deleting and then recreating a key environment. 

AWS on Friday shot back to flag what it dubbed “inaccuracies” in the FT story. “The brief service interruption they reported on was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims,” AWS said. 

To quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, “So, what I told you was true…from a certain point of view. Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” The more we look into the particulars of the December incident, the more user error doesn’t mean what the company is suggesting it means. 

AWS continued: “The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer—which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run.” 

That much seems true. It’s also a classic misdirection. The company conveniently forgot to confirm that the point of the story — that the system decided to delete and recreate an environment — was correct. 

“The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role — the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action.” That’s an impressively narrow interpretation of what happened.AWS then promised it won’t do it again. “We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again — not because the event had a big impact (it didn’t), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool — AI-powered or not — we think it is important to learn from these experiences. The Financial Times‘ claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false.”

As for the AWS statement, the hyperscaler doth protest too much, methinks. 

This is a critical issue for a few reasons. First, AWS is hardly the first AI firm shouting “user error” when their systems misbehave. Secondly, this is part of a disconcerting trend of AI systems overreaching or even flatly ignoring human instructions. 

In an emailed comment, AWS added that, “Kiro puts developers in control — users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorization before taking any action. In this case, an engineer was using a role with broader permissions than expected — a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role — the same issue that could occur with any developer tool or manual action.”

In an interview ,an AWS spokesperson argued that the user error was not the approved system request, but that the AWS engineer apparently misunderstood what their own level of privilege was. “The human was confused by what privileges that they had. They thought that they had narrower privileges than they actually had,” the AWS spokesperson said. 

This becomes relevant because most agentic systems, and Kiro is one of them, have the same privileges as the human they’re working with. The AWS argument is that the engineer might have been more careful or somehow acted differently had he or she understood the high level of privilege the agent had been granted.

The key detail missing — which AWS would not clarify — is just what was asked and how the engineer replied. Had the engineer been asked by Kiro “I would like to delete and then recreate this environment. May I proceed?” and the engineer replied, “By all means. Please do so,” that would have been user error. But that seems highly unlikely.

The more likely scenario is that the system asked something along the lines of “Do you want me to clean up and make this environment more efficient and faster?” Did the engineer say “Sure” or did the engineer respond, “Please list every single change you are proposing along with the likely result and the worst-case scenario result. Once I review that list, I will be able to make a decision.”

That gets into a key IT issue: Do we need training on how to interact with AI? If an employee starts answering AI tools as if they were human, problems will materialize. AI systems seem smart, but they do not process data as humans do. 

Recently, an AWS executive posted about a glitch involving an AI system that was trying to replicate registration forms. It looked at fields such as username and password and saw that the system only permitted one user to have that exact string of characters. The AI extrapolated from that and started rejecting users if they were the same age, with the notice “user with this age already exists.”

It’s like a civil service employee who memorized a rule but never asked the point of the rule. Without knowing that context, that employee can’t make a rational decision about when the rule should be waived.

Like the car driver who went over the cliff, the smartest decision is to not use any autonomous AI system at all. But given that it seems all-but-unavoidable today, the second-best option is to insist that employees demand to know precisely what they are being asked to approve. 

That may not eliminate AI disasters, but it will hopefully slow them down.

Source:: Computer World

By Ana-Maria Stanciuc Nvidia has become shorthand for the AI market itself. In the years since generative models reshaped computing, the company’s GPUs have powered everything from large-scale training clusters to real-time inference infrastructure. That dominance helped Nvidia’s stock surge over 1,500 percent from 2022 into 2025 and made it one of the most valuable tech firms in […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Ana-Maria Stanciuc The UK government announced new regulatory requirements that will bring major video-on-demand (VoD) platforms under tighter oversight by Ofcom, aligning them more closely with traditional television broadcasters. The changes are part of implementing the Media Act 2024 and mark one of the most significant shifts in how online streaming services are governed in the UK. […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai It’s not even been a week since vivo introduced the new V70 series, which, btw, I…
The post vivo V70 FE Leak Reveals 200MP Camera and 7,000mAh Battery appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Deepti Pathak Instagram is one of the most used social media apps today. People share photos, videos, and…
The post How To Check Who Shared Your Instagram Post & Reels? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Pranob Mehrotra Honor is jumping on the humanoid robot bandwagon and will showcase its offering at MWC alongside the Robot Phone and the Magic V6.
The post Honor is bringing its first humanoid robot to MWC, and it could help you shop appeared first on Digital Trends.

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By Shikhar Mehrotra Galaxy Buds 4 Pro may gain head gestures, camera remote functionality, and a physical find-my-phone shortcut, though both models reportedly miss out on case speakers.
The post Samsung leak drops info on a whole bunch of feature upgrades on Galaxy Buds 4 appeared first on Digital Trends.

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Nvidia has been talking about sovereign AI for years, but is finding that India’s cultural and economic diversity calls for a different approach.

Unlike in the US, truckloads of GPUs won’t drive the chipmaker’s expansion in India. Instead, the company plans to focus on software first, and deal with computing power  later. It’s betting on a data-first approach, with a localized AI plan customized for the diversity of demographics, cultures, and languages. 

Nvidia is also wooing India’s huge developer base by touting its open-source credentials and devising a localized AI plan that includes smaller language models adapted for the local energy and data center infrastructure. 

“The data that gets created here, when assembled together in an Indian stack, creates population scale stacks that citizens can enjoy and solve many of the mega challenges India faces, be it in education, healthcare, mobility,” said Vishal Dhupar, Nvidia’s managing director in South Asia.

The Indian government has specifically pointed out how it consumes AI differently than countries like the US. For example, farmers don’t need access to large language models (LLMs), and can solve problems with targeted, smaller models that run on low-power chips.

Nvidia’s plan for India’s sovereign IT efforts includes expanding open models such as Nemotrol and development tools to Indian developers. “Open models can supercharge sovereign AI, helping our developers reflect their own language, tradition and culture in everything we do,” Dhupar said.

Nvidia last year made it possible for developers to write CUDA programs using Python, which is popular in India. The code indirectly helps sell more Nvidia GPUs, because  developers writing CUDA code need its graphics chips to execute AI loads.

The company’s Blackwell-class GPUs are being installed in India data centers, although  the nation’s infrastructure isn’t as mature as in the US. But India has room for a post-GPU AI infrastructure environment, especially given power and resource constraints, which is why it is already preparing for a world of low-power chips and edge processing.

India’s IT minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, at last month’s World Economic Forum proposed jumping straight to lower power consumption chips that can run small language models. 

Vaishnaw’s rationale is that the smaller models will solve 95% of Indian users’ problems at a fraction of the cost. Moreover, the nation doesn’t want to fall prey to the AI bubble, in which the collapse of one overvalued AI company could hurt the economy.

Nvidia’s open-source Nemotron models have played a role in the development of some localized models, including the 17-billion-parameter BharatGen, which powers applications in public services, agriculture, security and cultural preservation, the company said.

Nvidia has also contributed to AI in India’s central digital payment system called United Payments Interface (UPI), which has been praised for its speed and efficiency. NPCI, which runs UPI, “is exploring training FiMi, a financial model for India, using the Nvidia Nemotron 3 Nano model and its own datasets,” Nvidia said in a statement.

Nvidia’s AI technology also has ties to the 8-billion parameter model Chariot, a multilingual communications platform, and Sarvam.ai, a multimodal AI platform for India-specific applications.

Beyond that, the company is working closely with India to help train the next generation of developers and elevate emerging startups. For example, it is collaborating with the Indian government’s Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) to boost cutting-edge AI research across the nation’s leading academic institutions. 

The company will offer ANRF grantee institutions complimentary access to Nvidia AI Enterprise software and specialized technical mentorship through the Nvidia AI Technology Center. “The collaboration will also include AI bootcamps, workshops and hackathons to strengthen India’s AI research ecosystem,” an Nvidia spokeswoman said.

Yotta is putting 20,000 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs in its Shakti cloud, which is inline with India’s sovereign AI infrastructure plans. Larsen & Toubro and E2E Networks also announced plans to create new data centers with Nvidia GPUs. 

Nvidia has talked about its sovereign AI plans in Europe, which includes establishing GPU data centers and partnerships with telecom, software and industrial companies. Gartner recently said that European investments in sovereign IaaS could reach $12.6 billion in 2026, growing from $6.9 billion in 2025. 

Source:: Computer World

When it comes to hardware and services revenues, storage is Apple’s secret spell. Not only has iCloud storage become Apple’s most frequently paid-for service, but people are more often purchasing additional storage when acquiring new Apple hardware.

This is good business for the company and all it had to do to build that business was to sell world-class products everybody wants, while managing to remain notably stingy in the quantity of storage it offers inside both its devices and free online storage tier. 

So, what’s my evidence for these claims?

What’s the evidence to justify this?

They’re anecdotal, to some extent. Apple has always offered only 5GB of free iCloud storage, even back when 5GB was still too little but meant a lot more. It has always offered relatively low quantities of storage in its entry-level devices. People do complain about this, but the company still generates industry-leading consumer satisfaction figures despite those limitations. 

There is factual evidence to support these claims:

Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) tells us 70% of US Apple device purchasers pay for iCloud storage. This has been a consistent pattern for years and it really helps Apple generate additional services sales. Services currently generate around $100 billion in revenue for the company at around a 60% to 70% margin. (iCloud is estimated to account for  perhaps $10.4 billion of that.)

The researcher also tells us that 46% of all iPhone buyers upgraded from base storage to higher storage levels in the December 2025 quarter, up slightly on the previous year. (Apple increased the base storage with iPhone 17, likely for Apple Intelligence.) If you look at how the company sets up its pricing tiers, you’ll find how easy it makes additional storage costs appear. Why wouldn’t you spend an extra $100 for more space for your photos? CIRP believes storage tweaking means consumers pay up to 50% more than the base price for their selected iPhone as a result of making added storage decisions.

And don’t underestimate the role of Photos in Apple’s business. The company has worked hard to make the camera system on iPhones world class, even when compared to dedicated digital cameras. That’s attractive to customers, but also means you need a little more storage for all those images on your devices over time. Consumer addiction to taking pictures of friends, family, pets, and what they eat feeds the need for storage on Apple devices, one forgettable memory at a time.

Just as it does when it comes to developing its hardware, Apple takes a “whole widget” approach across its ecosystem. It thinks about how each piece of its vast ecosystem interacts with and can support every other piece. That means someone inside the company likely already has the data on the overall value of storage across the Apple enterprise. In short, storage has become a key profit lever, with Apple-managed storage scarcity stimulating storage demand.

Happy customers don’t mind too much

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. Critics moaning about Apple’s famed low storage levels would only find something else to complain about if Apple loaded more storage inside its devices. There’s always going to be something that can be improved.

For Apple management, those complaints will be weighed against the company’s industry leading consumer satisfaction rankings. It tells Apple’s leaders that yes, while storage is clearly an issue to many people, it’s not enough of a problem to severely dent the value of the “Apple experience.”

There’s a lot of truth in that. After all, as long as everyone remains happy with the Apple products they own, the storage side-business Apple has managed to put together remains a fortunate revenue driver. It is, after all, still a choice and frugal customers can potentially survive without investing in additional device storage. But people keep paying for the upgrades. 

(In a statement following a successful defense against a 2024 lawsuit, the company said this: “Apple believes in providing our customers with choices. Our users are not required to use iCloud, and many rely on a wide range of third-party alternatives for data storage. In addition, we work hard to make data transfer as easy as possible — whether it’s to iCloud or another service.”)

In the end, Apple provides a tightly integrated ecosystem that delivers experiences that build customer loyalty while also generating strong revenues. Storage revenues help the company deliver both strong shareholder value while supporting high quality, high design tech products and services that provide compelling value to customers, most of whom seem happy with the exchange. If only every profitable business could achieve the same thing.

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe. Also, now on Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

By Ana-Maria Stanciuc OpenAI is broadening how it helps large organizations put artificial intelligence into real use. The company announced a new initiative, Frontier Alliances, teaming up with four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey & Company, Accenture, and Capgemini, to help enterprises move beyond pilot AI projects and embed intelligent systems deeply into business workflows. […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Paulo Vargas Gen Z is hunting down old iPods on eBay and Marketplace. They want music without notifications, algorithms, or distraction. The click wheel is their digital detox.
The post Gen Z is fueling an iPod comeback appeared first on Digital Trends.

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By Ana-Maria Stanciuc In 2026, one of Europe’s most ambitious scientific ventures, Horizon Europe, a seven-year, roughly €93 billion framework dedicated to research and innovation, underwent a quiet but significant transformation.  What had once been an open invitation to researchers across the globe now carries a more guarded tenor.  In critical areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai In 2026, everyone’s scrolling through Instagram’s reels, and the creator economy is booming like never before….
The post Best Time to Post on Instagram for Maximum Reach in 2026 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Adarsh Verma In today’s world, where more and more lives are online, social proof is very important. Things…
The post The Data Behind Social Proof: What Marketers Should Measure appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Omair Khaliq Sultan This is the kind of deal that doesn’t need much overthinking. If you’ve been wanting a pair of wireless noise-canceling headphones from a brand you already trust, $99.99 is a very comfortable price to jump in. That’s $78.01 off the $178 comp value, and it puts Sony’s WH-CH720N in a range where they make a […] The post A sub-$100 Sony ANC headphone deal is hard to ignore appeared first on Digital Trends.

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