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High accuracy scores come from conditions that don't reflect real-world usage

Facial recognition technology has been deployed publicly on the basis of benchmark tests that reflect performance in laboratory settings, but some academics are saying that real-world performance doesn't match up.…

Meet the new COPILOT function

Microsoft, in its ongoing effort to AI-ify every product it has, is now adding it right into the cells of Excel.  Available on Monday to beta users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new COPILOT function allows you to task Redmond's AI with performing generative tasks right in, for example, C2 or B23.…

Got a particle accelerator? Here’s your tritium startup idea

Tritium is ridiculously rare, incredibly expensive, and central to most fusion energy reactor designs. If research out of Los Alamos National Lab proves to hold true, it might soon become easier to obtain.…

Spy vs spy in the chips

Comment Chinese state media called the US an aspiring "surveillance empire" over its proposed use of asset tracking tags to crack down on black-market GPU shipments to the Middle Kingdom.…

MIT NANDA study finds only 5 percent of organizations using AI tools in production at scale

US companies have invested between $35 and $40 billion in Generative AI initiatives and, so far, have almost nothing to show for it.…

A plan to standardize IT record keeping is incomplete after 8 years, and the GAO wants someone to act

The US federal government first planned to standardize its categorization of IT costs, resources, and solutions back in 2017. Eight years later, the project has mostly stalled, say auditors, and now they're demanding that it either get priority or get the axe.…

Traditional business applications will become the mainframes of the 2030s - functioning but obsolete systems replaced by AI agents, predicts Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna. AI agents featuring generative AI interfaces, goal-oriented processing, and vector databases will supplant today's form-driven, workflow-based enterprise software within five years, said Lamanna, who leads Microsoft's business applications and platforms division. The executive projects industry patterns for agent-based systems will solidify within 6-18 months. Microsoft MVP Rocky Lhotka called the 2030 timeline "very forward-looking and optimistic," noting that capital-intensive industries cannot readily replace existing infrastructure with virtual agents.

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Trading volume on AI prediction markets reached approximately $20 million this month across platforms including Kalshi and Polymarket. Kalshi reports ten times the AI trading volume compared to early 2025. Bettors place wagers on outcomes including monthly AI model rankings, federal AI regulation prospects, and Sam Altman's potential OpenAI equity stake.

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Surprise – updated plans way more expensive than initially suggested

AWS has introduced new pricing for Kiro, its AI-driven coding tool, but unlike the pricing originally announced, the latest plans are "a wallet-wrecking tragedy," according to many of its users.…

Supply chain breach has been a major target of legal action

Microsoft-owned talk-to-text outfit Nuance has agreed to cough up $8.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit over the sprawling MOVEit Transfer mega-breach – although it admits no liability.…

Prospect magazine, in a recent piece: "LinkedIn doesn't know me anymore," someone complained to me recently. "What do you mean?" I asked. She explained that the platform has replaced the old "recommended jobs" section, which used to show her quite useful job openings based on her previous searches and CV, with an AI search engine that asks you to describe your ideal job in freeform text. The results it brings up aren't nearly as relevant. This is just one of many ways in which the professionals' social media platform, which has embraced artificial intelligence with ferocious zeal, is being gradually "enshittified," to borrow tech writer Cory Doctorow's phrase. Each new embrace of AI tools promises to make hiring, job searching, networking and even posting a bit easier or more fruitful. Instead, AI seems to have made the user's experience more alienating, and to have helped foster a genre of LinkedIn-speak which bears all the hallmarks of the worst AI writing on the internet. Let's start with my opening example -- which, to be fair, is in beta testing mode and can be switched off. Instead of the AI assistant being like an intuitive digital servant, pulling up the best jobs based on your ruminations, users are confronted with a new and annoying task: crafting prompts for the AI. But the non-AI search bar worked perfectly well as it was. Then there is the AI writing assistant, which is available to users who pay for the platform's $40 per month premium service to help them craft their posts. LinkedIn's CEO Ryan Roslansky recently admitted that users aren't using the tool as much as he anticipated. It seems that sounding like a human being to your colleagues and clients is put at, well, a premium. And then there are the ways in which users are deploying outputs from external AI chatbots on the platform, something with which LinkedIn is struggling to cope. According to the New York Times, the number of job applications submitted via the platform increased by 45 per cent in the year to June, now clocking in at an average of 11,000 per minute.

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P2P power networks beat stingy feed-in tariffs for Aussie households, study finds

Boffins looking into the Australian solar energy ecosystem say that sharing really is caring – and potentially profitable when homes with solar panels can sell their excess energy to neighbors at a preferential rate.…

Dust is that "feature" or drawback, The Verge's reviewer Allison Johnson argues. Samsung's head of smartphone planning Minseok Kang told her earlier this year that creating dustproof foldable phones remains technically challenging but "not impossible." Current flagship foldables from Samsung and Motorola carry IP48 ratings that protect against particles larger than one millimeter, while traditional smartphones at similar price points offer full IP68 dust and water resistance. The durability gap persists five years after Samsung's original Galaxy Fold experienced screen failures from small particles entering the hinge mechanism.

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HR SaaS giant insists core systems untouched

Workday has admitted that attackers gained access to one of its third-party CRM platforms, but insists its core systems and customer tenants are untouched.…

Wikipedia volunteer Grnrchst uncovered a decade-long campaign that created articles about composer David Woodard in 335 languages. The investigation identified 200 accounts and IP addresses systematically creating Woodard articles across 92 languages between 2017 and 2019, averaging one new article every six days. From December 2021 through June 2025, 183 unique accounts each created a single Woodard article in different languages after establishing credibility through unrelated edits. Wikipedia stewards removed 235 articles from smaller wikis. Larger Wikipedia communities banned numerous accounts and deleted 80 additional articles. Twenty Woodard articles remain. Grnrchst called it "the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history."

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If at first you succeed, keep trying until you don't

SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch, blaming a previous failure on structural issues and fuel pressurization problems.…

Virtual agents to guide citizens through red tape – but not remove any of it

The UK government has leapt into the AI hype with a raft of "Exemplar" programs it claims will deliver billions in value – including a Clippy-style assistant to help citizens navigate complex forms and legal jargon, rather than simply making them clearer in the first place.…

"The U.S. is currently home to more than 18 million cancer survivors," reports the Wall Street Journal, "over 5% of the total population" (including those who are living with the disease). Their article tells the story of Gwen Orilio, who was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer at age 31. Ten years later she's still alive — and she still has metastatic cancer... Keeping her going is a string of new treatments that don't cure the disease but can buy months — even years — of time, with the hope that once one drug stops working a new one will come along. Orilio started on chemotherapy, and then switched to a new treatment, and then another, and another, and another... A small but growing population is living longer with incurable or advanced cancer, navigating the rest of their lives with a disease increasingly akin to a chronic illness. The trend, which started in breast cancer, has expanded to patients with melanoma, kidney cancer, lung cancer and others. The new drugs can add years to a life, even for some diagnoses like Orilio's that were once swift death sentences. They also put people in a state of limbo, living on a knife's edge waiting for the next scan to say a drug has stopped working and doctors need to find a new one. The wide range of survival times has made it more difficult for cancer doctors to predict how much time a patient might have left. For most, the options eventually run out.... More than 690,000 people were projected to be living with stage-four or metastatic disease of the six most common cancers — melanoma, breast, bladder, colorectal, prostate or lung cancer — in 2025, according to a 2022 report from the National Cancer Institute. That's an increase from 623,000 in 2018 and a significant rise since 1990, the report found... Nearly 30% of survivors diagnosed with metastatic melanoma and 20% of those diagnosed with metastatic colorectal or breast cancer had been living with their disease for a decade or more, the NCI paper estimated... Even for lung cancer, the biggest U.S. cancer killer, the five-year relative survival rate for advanced disease has inched up, from 3.7% for patients diagnosed in 2004 to 9.2% for patients diagnosed in 2017, federal data show. The overall lung cancer survival rate has risen by 26% in the past five years, according to the American Lung Association, as declining cigarette use, screening and new drugs have driven down deaths. The expanding number of therapies that target a cancer's mutations or boost the immune system are improving the outlook for several cancers. In breast cancer, treatment for metastatic disease accounted for 29% of the drop in deaths between 1975 and 2019, according to one 2024 estimate, with screening and treatment for early-stage disease accounting for the rest. The number of American cancer survivors (or those living with cancer) is expected to grow to 26 million by 2040," the article points out.

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Agency swears breaches are rare, just not rare enough to stop 186 being binned for sticky fingers

The UK tax authority has been forced to clean house after dozens of staff were caught helping themselves to taxpayer records.…

Sni5Gect research crew targets sweet spot during device / network handshake pause

Security boffins have released an open source tool for poking holes in 5G mobile networks, claiming it can do up- and downlink sniffing and a novel connection downgrade attack - plus "other serious exploits" they're keeping under wraps, for now.…