Author: InfoForTech

Saad Nadeem, co-founder of Seattle startup Local Crew. (Photo courtesy of Saad Nadeem) Saad Nadeem doesn’t have any professional background in home improvement. But like any self-respecting weekend warrior, his experiences as a homeowner have taught him some valuable lessons. The biggest lesson, perhaps, was to create his own startup to solve his problems. Nadeem is co-founder and CEO of Local Crew, a newly launched Seattle startup designed to make it easier to find laborers, assess bids, and hire a professional to perform everything from yard work to house repairs. “Even for straightforward projects, I had to contact several pros,…

AI governance now has to account for systems that perform work rather than merely assist employees. That shift is especially relevant for Workiva Inc., which operates in reporting, audit and compliance workflows where errors carry serious consequences. As companies introduce AI agents into finance and other regulated functions, plausible output is no longer enough. Businesses must be able to trace information, identify approvals and reconstruct the actions an agent took on their behalf, according to Krista Case (pictured, left), principal analyst at theCUBE Research. “We need to understand things like where did this information and where did these insights come…

Enterprises in Russia have emerged as the target of three threat activity clusters tracked as NightEagle, Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls, according to multiple reports from Kaspersky. The cybersecurity vendor said it has identified attacks mounted by NightEagle (aka APT-Q-95), a threat actor known to be active since at least 2023, that involve new techniques for persistence and lateral movement. “In most incidents, the attackers used compromised valid credentials to gain access to corporate VPNs,” Kaspersky said in an analysis published today. “VPN connections originated from IP addresses in the Russian segment linked to Cloudflare WARP tunnels, as well as…

Where Amodei calls for regulatory precautions for AI’s development, Huang dismisses the need for new laws. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently floated a bold idea: give AI companies a temporary antitrust exemption so competitors can legally coordinate to slow down AI development. The goal is to give safety researchers time to test powerful new models without risking their market position. Leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk even signaled support for taking a breather. Then Jensen Huang stepped in and completely dismantled that premise. Speaking with CNBC, Nvidia’s chief executive dismissed the need for new laws, antitrust waivers,…

Is AI going to kill us all?In Silicon Valley, it’s not such a novel question. But after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon quit his job last week and posted on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a lot more people are asking.“This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”Coxon is far from alone in his assessment — some…

Microsoft has released an out-of-band Windows update after its September security patch caused problems with Remote Desktop, Linux virtual machines, and some USB audio devices. The Sept. 14 update arrives less than a week after Microsoft’s Sept. 8 security release. On affected systems, Remote Desktop Services can stop responding, shared Windows folders can disappear from some Hyper-V-based Linux environments, and USB Audio Class 1.0 devices can fail in multichannel modes. For businesses that rely on remote access or Windows-hosted Linux workloads, the update is worth prioritizing rather than waiting for October’s regular Patch Tuesday. Which Windows versions get the update?…

If you’re a fan of Amazon’s ecosystem, whether that’s asking your Alexa speaker to tell you about the weather or compulsively checking the video feed from your Ring doorbell, then it makes sense to expand and build onto the system. It’s always easier to keep to one ecosystem as much as you can with smart home gear, letting you stick to a single app and single subscription if you decide to invest in one.While we’ve liked Ring’s cameras and home security products fine enough, they’re hard to recommend at the top of our guides since Ring is reintroducing a policy…

There are many AI tools to help build presentations or slide decks. We’ve experimented with many of them and found some are pretty good, others are generic or pretty awful.

Unlike most of its social media rivals, Snap hasn’t made many big bets on AI. The company has added a bunch of generative AI-powered features to Snapchat, but it hasn’t made the technology a central focus. Now, the company is introducing a new standalone AI assistant alongside its redesigned AR glasses. Called Specs Intelligence, the “anticipatory AI service” will feature prominently in Snap’s hardware, but will also have dedicated desktop and mobile apps for those who don’t have a pair of glasses. Snap doesn’t describe Specs Intelligence as an agent or assistant, but its description will sound familiar to anyone…

OpenAI Group PBC today disclosed six new “concerning” incidents involving artificial intelligence agents behaving badly again. The agents made up data, moved files onto the public internet without permission and hid their mistakes from their human controllers, the company said. The revelations came as OpenAI unveiled a new framework for users to report “misalignment” in AI systems, defined as when the goals or actions of AI models and agents diverge from human intentions and values. According to OpenAI, the AI industry still has not managed to solve problems around alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree that it can still…