Author: InfoForTech

Berlin’s state government has confirmed that it is the target of an extortion attempt following the August compromise of the city’s state administrative network, and said it will not meet the extortionists’ demands. The same statement disclosed that forensic work had found further data outflows in the portfolio of the Senate Department for Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and Environment, with the exfiltration dated between August 7 and August 12, 2026. Scope and content are still being examined, and the Senate Chancellery said personal or other non-public data cannot be excluded from what was taken. The department first reported an outflow…

Microsoft may be preparing to rethink what an Xbox console actually looks like. Rather than building a single successor to the Xbox Series X|S, the company appears to be developing a broader range of hardware under the Project Helix name. The revelation came from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma in an interview with BBC News at Gamescom 2026. Sharma described Helix as a “great family of devices”, suggesting Microsoft’s next-generation hardware plans extend beyond one traditional living-room console. Microsoft has previously confirmed that Project Helix is the codename for its next-generation Xbox platform, but Sharma’s latest comments provide the clearest indication…

Candy Cottage turned imported sweets into a growing business through livestreams Chelsea Chan, 31, was working in marketing when she noticed something missing in Singapore: a pick-and-mix candy shop that could satisfy her cravings. The last brand to do it well, Mini Toons, had closed in 2020. What remained were supermarket shelves stocked with the same handful of familiar names—mostly prepacked containers, with pick-and-mix sections, where they existed at all, offering only a limited selection. Then, in 2022, while scrolling through TikTok, Chelsea noticed candy livestreams going viral everywhere except Singapore. She saw an opportunity to shake up the local…

Ring has a new answer to a difficult security-camera trade-off: keeping cloud-powered intelligence without retaining long-term access to the keys that unlock customers’ videos. The Amazon-owned company announced TAKE, or Throw Away the Key Encryption, on Aug. 26. A phased rollout begins in September 2026, with Ring planning to make the system its default encryption worldwide while retaining cloud-dependent features such as intelligent alerts, video descriptions, and search. End-to-end encryption will remain optional. How Ring TAKE limits access to video Under Ring’s TAKE system, recordings use unique, rotating encryption keys. Ring temporarily holds a copy inside a secure cloud enclave…

Under the influence of psychedelics, the usual organization of the human brain loosens. That’s what scientists have generally thought, with several studies showing that when we take these substances, the signals pinging between our neurons become more diverse and unpredictable. This increased entropy in our gray matter may underlie the strange, random, and often memorable experiences of psychedelic trips.But in one of the largest neuroimaging studies on the effects of psilocybin to date, researchers uncovered a hidden order in the apparent chaos. The study, published in Nature, indicates that while psilocybin blurs some of the boundaries within the brain, our…

Agnes Kim, founder of ViaJiin, a Korean-sourced beauty supply startup based in the Seattle area, with some of the skincare products that her new company offers. (ViaJiin Photos) Long before the July email arrived confirming she was one of thousands of Xbox employees laid off in Microsoft’s latest round of job cuts, Agnes Kim could feel the impending doom hanging over big tech. But instead of waiting around for the next pendulum swing, the eight-year Xbox veteran spent her nights and weekends laying the groundwork for a very different kind of reboot: a boutique Korean skincare startup called ViaJiin. The…

Owner.com Inc., a startup with a platform that helps restaurant operators coordinate their day-to-day business operations, has raised $240 million in funding. Goldman Sachs led the Series D round. Owner said in today’s funding announcement that the bank was joined by Meritech, Redpoint, Headline and Benchmark partner Jack Altman, Sam Altman’s brother. The startup is now worth $2.3 billion. Many of the features in Owner’s platform focus on easing restaurants’ marketing efforts. The software can generate a restaurant website complete with a menu, a form for submitting catering orders and other promotional widgets in a few days. From there, it occasionally…

Imagine this: Two countries are at war. Country X sends a drone into a major industrial city in Country Y, aiming to take out two propane tanks. A routine sequence. But this time, the drone never reaches its targets. Instead, Country X’s drone accidentally strikes a wall nearby, explodes, and kills three young civilians.When Country Y eventually retrieves the drone’s remnants for intel, it finds an AI supercomputer inside that reveals something unsettling. Instead of a human deciding what to strike — the AI did.A Russian AI-enabled drone reportedly selected its own target in Ukraine, killing three civilians — an…

Paid content syndication puts your content in front of buyers already researching your category. Most B2B teams run it wrong and wonder why downloads don’t become pipeline. Most B2B marketing teams chase two problems at once: not enough leads, and leads that never convert. Paid content syndication solves the first problem reliably. Whether it solves the second one depends entirely on what happens after the download. Here’s the setup. A prospect researches a category your product addresses. A publisher in a paid syndication network surfaces your whitepaper or eBook while they’re mid-research. They submit their details to access it. You…

People are grafting a pre-release version onto their favorite games with unspectacular results. Sometimes, photorealism (or something approaching it) makes a video game look better. Other times, well, you get whatever this is from NVIDIA’s leaked build of DLSS 5. The unfinished software, extracted from an early-access PC version of NBA 2K27, has been grafted onto various games. The results are… let’s just say, not universally beloved. DLSS 5’s neural rendering model takes the upscaling technology in a new direction. Rather than simply reconstructing a sharper version of the image the game rendered, it “infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and…