By Lize Hong Startup wisdom is a new TNW series offering practical lessons from experts who’ve helped build great companies. This week, Lize Hong, the founder of strategic communications firm Venture Vox, shares her tips on getting startups noticed. Startups don’t fail because they lack a good product. They fail because no one knows or cares about them. It’s brutal, but true. While many founders cling to the myth that “build it and they will come,” the reality is that attention is oxygen for startups. I’ve learned this through experience. As a tech communications expert, I’ve defended the reputations of companies like Google and Uber…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Adarsh Verma Working outside a traditional office offers flexibility, but it also comes with obstacles. Many professionals need…
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Digitimes tells us Apple is intensively pushing supply partners to invest deeply in automated manufacturing in their factories. This isn’t new, but what has changed is the degree to which the company is insisting on it. The report tells us that if you want Apple to place an order with your company, you must invest in automation.

This isn’t specific to any product. Apple is pushing for this degree of automation across all its supply lines, and while there is an initial cost for its suppliers, this should be mitigated in future due to increased manufacturing efficiency and reduced production costs — mostly, I imagine, through not needing as many humans in the process.

Apple wants to cut the workforce by half

The report describes these moves as part of the company strategy to disentangle its manufacturing systems from China. That’s potentially true, but it is also true that Apple has been investing in smart industrial production for a very long time. And last year we learned the company is investing deeply in automating iPhone production, aiming to slash the number of workers it needs for final assembly by half.

This is already happening, with headcount reductions of up to 30% in some roles. Apple’s investment in Darwin AI was a significant investment in these plans, led by Sabih Khan, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer and Peter Thompson, VP Technical Ops.

Major Apple supplier Foxconn is investing in the same thing. Robots replaced 60,000 employees in one of its factories in 2016, and the iPhone production partner is also experimenting with humanoid robots. Even before this most recent Apple drive to automate, Foxconn had reduced the quantity of humans it needed to make devices by up to 30%. 

I could go on. The signs are there. This is what it all means. 

Automatic (not) for the people

There will eventually be manufacturing jobs coming back to former industrialized economies, but they won’t be the same as before. There will be a lot less of them, and the factories you make things in will be lonely places with hardly anyone on site, lots of security, loads of automation, and expertise just one spatial video call away.

Welcome to the future world of smart manufacturing. 

What will those factories be like? 

It’s easy to imagine a world where the people aren’t. Expect heavily automated production lines and distribution networks, extensive use of robotics, and strategic use of humans for those fiddly jobs robots aren’t good at, and for the highly skilled system maintenance roles. 

Semi-skilled labor

That’s not to say you’ll need to be highly skilled yourself — you’ll just need to know enough about what you’re doing not to get hurt and be able to wear a Vision Pro headset to handle challenges with help from the specialist at head office. It’s so much cheaper to employ one hugely skilled specialist and some reasonably smart engineers than to ensure that all the tech workers are equally capable. In some cases, you won’t even need a human at the front end, because the AI-driven robot will be able to collaborate just as well in some tasks.

Though you probably won’t want to risk a $100,000 automaton in any of the more dangerous, high-risk challenges. A squishy human will do them fine, and any subsequent insurance payouts will be cheaper than a new machine, particularly once the human’s family reads the small print in the contract their dearly departed signed. 

Feel the energy

Fossil fuel advocates must come round to accepting the probability that all this automation will be powered by some form or renewable energy, which is so much more affordable than traditional energy. Why spend thousands on coal-generated electricity when you can get it free from the sun, once you put some solar panels down? 

Imagine that: fully automated factories, churning out products (with liberal use of recycled materials, further lowering manufacturing raw materials costs), with few human workers and free energy. (Fossil fuel energy will still have a big market in AI, of course — at least until the bubble pops).

Your name’s not on the door

This is the future of manufacturing in America, I think. It’s the future of manufacturing everywhere, and Apple (and others) are pressing forward full steam ahead on these ideas. What do you think Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund is for? That $500 billion will no doubt be invested in services and technologies to advance these ideas.

Welcome to the future. You may get a job running security at the door or doing those supremely fiddly, repetitive tasks robots don’t too terribly well — but even those “opportunities” won’t exist forever.

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

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak Inspired by the popular anime series One Piece, Anime Spirits is a fun Roblox game where…
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By Andrea Hak Jacqueline van den Ende, CEO of Carbon Equity, believes we have already passed the climate transition tipping point: “Last year, 90% of all new electricity production worldwide came from renewable sources, i.e. generated via solar, wind, or water. Meanwhile, China is actually ahead of its climate goals compared to other countries,” she said. This isn’t a sign to let up; if anything, van den Ende believes we need more investment into climate tech solutions that will help accelerate the transition and make clean energy accessible across the globe. Yet, European climate tech funding sunk to a five-year low in Q1…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Meta has released an important update for WhatsApp that patches CVE-2025-55177, a serious vulnerability that is actively exploited.

The vulnerability, along with another vulnerability (CVE-2025-43300), has been used to install spyware on iPhones and Macs.

According to Meta’s spokesperson Margarita Franklin, nearly 200 people have been monitored using the installed spyware and have been informed of the incident.

At the time of writing, it is unclear who is behind the campaign, Techcrunch reports.

Source:: Computer World

Prognosticators have been prognosticating for 20 years about a future in which hackers use AI to breach networks, steal data, and socially engineer credulous employees. And like so many AI-related futurisms in the age of LLM-based generative AI, this prediction is coming true.

Anthropic reported last week that a hacker used its technology for an AI-fueled crime spree involving large-scale ransomware attacks. The attacker used the Claude chatbot for recon, code generation, credential theft, infiltration, and ransom notes against 17 organizations, including healthcare providers, government agencies, religious charities, and a defense contractor.

The AI even helpfully proposed ransom amounts, ranging from $75,000 to $500,000 in Bitcoin. This marks the first known case where AI choreographed an entire extortion scheme, automating nearly every step.

AI is not only guiding and helping with cyberattacks, but even writing the code. Anthropic and the security firm ESET found that criminals are using generative AI to build and update actual ransomware code itself.

Anthropic identified a UK threat actor, GTG-5004, who developed, sold, and maintained AI-enhanced ransomware kits. Lacking technical skill with encryption or anti-analysis tools, they relied on Anthropic’s Claude chatbot for coding and software packaging. Ransomware services ranged from $400 to $1,200 for different bundles, allowing low-skilled crooks to unleash advanced malware.

These programs actually morph to dodge antivirus scans and slip past new security rules before defenders react.

ESET studied a proof-of-concept called PromptLock, which could generate and run malicious scripts using an open-source model based on OpenAI’s code, and adapt on the fly to target or encrypt files.

Researchers hack the chatbots

GenAI chatbots are designed to prevent misuse, but hackers are incentivized to “jailbreak” the tools and bypass their guardrails and alignment mechanisms for malicious purposes. Palo Alto Networks researchers showed how to do it: Just write poorly.

Researchers Tony Li and Hongliang Liu recently published information about how large language models — including Google’s Gemma, Meta’s Llama, and Alibaba’s Qwen — could be tricked by poorly punctuated, run-on sentences.

Sentences with bad grammar and without concluding punctuation can slow down chatbot safety “alignment” mechanisms, allowing harmful prompts to slip through. This method could elicit instructions for committing crimes, gathering private information, creating malware, or committing fraud.

Researchers at Trail of Bits, led by Kikimora Morozova and Suha Sabi Hussain, found another way around chatbot guardrails. By hiding malicious prompts in large, high-resolution photos and letting the AI’s downscaling algorithms reveal those messages, they could make production systems like Google’s Gemini and Vertex AI echo instructions an end user never saw — or intended. Call it a “multimodal prompt injection” attack.

The researchers found these attacks worked across systems, infecting everything from desktop tools to cloud APIs.

This method can trick both chatbots and users. By sending large numbers of users a photo with hidden prompts, an attacker could use them to commit widespread attacks.

Scammers let AI do the talking

More than six years ago, the cybersecurity world was alarmed when criminals used deepfake audio to impersonate a CEO to steal money. The scammers called, using technology to imitate the voice of the CEO for the German parent company of a UK-based energy firm. The fake German CEO called the real UK CEO and urgently requested the transfer of $243,000 to a Hungarian supplier for an urgent business need.

In the deepfake era, the crime was unprecedented and exotic. In the genAI era, it’s a banality.

You just need a three-second recording of a person talking, according to McAfee experts. With that snippet, you can create convincing fake messages or phone calls. If someone sounds like a trusted person, people are ready to hand over their cash or secrets. In 2024, the company’s global study found one in four people had suffered or knew someone hit by an AI voice scam.

Thanks to genAI, the technology is so good it can fool even a parent. A California man last year got a call from someone using a cloned copy of his son’s voice. The fake son claimed he’d been in an accident, had been taken into police custody, and needed bail money fast. After more calls and pressure from scammers, the dad withdrew thousands and sent it to the scammers.

In 2024, crooks cloned Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto’s voice to target big businesses — fashion legend Giorgio Armani, Prada’s Patrizio Bertelli, and former Inter Milan boss Massimo Moratti received calls from “Crosetto” about kidnapped journalists in peril. These convinced Moratti to transfer nearly one million euros to a Hong Kong account (later traced and frozen in the Netherlands).

The new risk from AI browsers

One challenge in the field of AI-enabled attacks — which is to say, attacks that didn’t exist or weren’t possible before genAI — is how quickly everything changes. Take AI browsers, for example. This new category of web browser includes Perplexity Comet, Dia (by The Browser Company), Fellou, Opera Neon, Sigma AI Browser, Arc Max, Microsoft Edge Copilot, Brave Leo, Wave Browser Pro, SigmaOS, Opera Aria, Genspark AI Browser, Poly, Quetta Browser, Browserbase, Phew AI Tab, and the upcoming OpenAI browser.

The most agentic is Perplexity’s Comet browser, which clicks links, navigates web pages, fills out forms, manages emails and calendars, books travel and makes purchases, analyzes browsing history, automates multistep workflows, interacts with logged-in services, compares products across websites, unsubscribes from emails, extracts and synthesizes information from multiple sources, manages tabs by opening and closing them, searches and filters through user-executed complex research tasks autonomously, and provides conversational assistance with contextual awareness across all browsing activities.

Security researchers at Guardio Labs demonstrated how simple it has become for criminals to trick AI browsers into committing crimes. When the researchers instructed Comet to buy an Apple Watch, the AI obediently visited a fake Walmart website they had created in 10 seconds using basic web tools. The browser ignored obvious signs of fraud and automatically filled in saved credit card details and shipping information to complete the purchase. In testing, Comet sometimes has refused the transaction or has asked for human approval, but in other cases it has handed over sensitive payment data directly to the scammers.

Brave and Guardio Labs discovered that criminals can manipulate Comet by hiding commands in fake CAPTCHA tests. The attack convinced the AI to click invisible buttons and bypass security checks without the user knowing.

(Note that Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner last week published a definitive statement announcing that the company will not integrate AI features into its browser because “we will not turn the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship.”)

Fight fire with fire

The truth is that most attacks are still the old-fashioned kind, performed without help from AI. And most still involve human error. So all the standard guidelines and best practices apply. Companies should update software regularly, require multifactor authentication for all logins, and give employees training about fake emails and malicious links. Outside experts should run penetration tests twice a year. Making regular offline backups can save thousands after AI-based ransomware attacks.

But in the new AI cyberattack era, AI-based cybersecurity tools have become a requirement. They can scan millions of network events every second and flag problems before anything bad happens.

The unfortunate truth is that the AI-powered cyberattack era has just begun.

Source:: Computer World

By Steven Kleinveld Founders’ takes is a new series featuring expert insights from tech leaders transforming industries with artificial intelligence. In this edition, Steven Kleinveld, founder of applied AI lab Skylark, argues that vibe coding won’t replace developers — it’ll upgrade them. There’s been a lot of talk lately that AI is going to replace developers. With the rise of tools that let you prompt your way into building apps, people are starting to wonder: “Are developers even still needed?” The short answer: yes — more than ever. The hype around no-code and “vibe coding” makes it seem like anyone can build a solid MVP…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Deepti Pathak Fire Force Reignition is a Roblox game inspired by the popular Fire Force anime. The game…
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By Hisan Kidwai The NYT’s Spelling Bee is a super fun word-hunting game where you have to guess as…
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By Hisan Kidwai The NYT’s Spelling Bee is a super fun word-hunting game where you have to guess as…
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By Hisan Kidwai The NYT’s Spelling Bee is a super fun word-hunting game where you have to guess as…
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By Hisan Kidwai Wordle is the super fun game from the NYT, which challenges players to use their extensive…
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Your freedom and privacy are at risk as the UK government continues its dangerous attempt to drive a great hole into data security, despite the vast weight of warnings that doing so will make all of us far less safe. 

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

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

Whose side are you on?

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

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

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

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

The back door everyone is searching for

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

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

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

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

An act of digital self-harm

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

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

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

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

Source:: Computer World

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

Source:: The Next Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

The impact for IT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source:: Computer World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source:: Computer World