Author: InfoForTech

CheQ launched CheQ UPI to bring credit card rewards to everyday RuPay transactions. Indian fintech app CheQ just launched CheQ UPI, targeting credit-savvy consumers across India. The new feature helps users link their RuPay credit cards directly within the app and earn rewards on everyday UPI payments. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) fundamentally shifted consumer behavior when it enabled RuPay credit cards on UPI. Before that integration, consumers used physical credit cards for major purchases while relying on debit-linked UPI for small transfers. Linking credit lines to instant QR code scans unlocked credit access at millions of local…

You’re not going to believe this, but turns out you can’t always take criminals at their word. Actually, I’ll walk that back a bit as it may not even be the cybercrime guys who got this wrong, but it all starts here: 🚨Cyber Alert ‼️🇺🇸US – 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗵𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘁ShinyHunters hacking group claims to have compromised Carhartt and allegedly stolen more than 50 GB of compressed data containing millions of customer records, employee information, customer metadata, loyalty-related information, and… pic.twitter.com/BvzsEQS54l— Hackmanac (@H4ckmanac) August 13, 2026 My usual Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) workflow after a breach emerges is to run our open source…

Staring at a pile of unedited clips is often the exact moment we give up on posting entirely. Instagram just tackled that problem head-on, by rolling out First Draft, a new one-tap tool that assembles your raw footage into a finished Reel in a few seconds. For now, First Draft is rolling out exclusively on iOS, with no word yet on when Android users might get access. How does First Draft create Reels for you on Instagram? The process starts just like making any other Reel. You select clips from your camera roll, but instead of manually trimming everything yourself,…

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced fresh sanctions on Iranian cyber actors as part of what it called an “unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign” against the nation and its enablers. “We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” said Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. The action, codenamed Operation Economic Outcast, aims to cut the Iranian regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the financial “lifelines” that support the “leading state sponsor of terror.” To…

TerraPower’s new Weed Maps helps farmers identify individual weeds as small as a quarter inch. Photo via TerraPower. The next big test for AI isn’t happening in a data center. It’s happening in the dirt. Really, it’s in the weeds. Two Seattle-area startups are betting that AI can transform how farmers find and eliminate unwanted plants — one by mapping every weed, the other by zapping them with lasers. Issaquah, Wash.-based TerraClear is commercializing a new system that uses ultra-high-resolution imagery and machine learning to map individual weeds across entire fields of corn and soybeans, then turns those detections into…

At the San Diego City Council’s most recent budget meeting, Sith Lord Darth Vader had some points to make. Between gasping breaths, Vader praised the council’s recent votes to renew its contract with the surveillance company Flock Safety, which has been making headlines recently as more and more stories of police officers abusing its tools have continued to come out—and as a WIRED review of code for a new AI tool already in use by some police departments has made clear that it is watching far more than just license plates.“The emperor is a fan of Flock. And we must…

In a handful of test runs inside a controlled evaluation environment, an AI model reached past its intended target, exploited real vulnerabilities, extracted credentials, and gained access to a live production database. The target wasn’t a simulation. It was a real company that had nothing to do with the test. That’s the account Irregular published of an incident it identified together with Anthropic. Irregular is an Israeli AI safety testing firm that has raised $80 million from investors including Sequoia and Redpoint Ventures, according to CNBC. In three test runs, models operating with permitted internet access exceeded the evaluations’ intended…

AI storage infrastructure is becoming a more consequential planning issue as organizations move from model training toward agentic AI. As agents reason, act and reassess, they build longer contexts and generate more data that they must access quickly during inference. Agentic AI is also changing the shape of the data problem. Interactions are growing longer and producing more information. At the same time, the data’s size, importance and movement through the infrastructure can all affect how quickly an application responds, according to Scott Shadley (pictured, left), director of technology planning at Solidigm Inc. “One of the beautiful things that’s happened…

There are times when turning off Find My is necessary, but you should always have it on otherwise to keep your phone safe. FellowNeko/Shutterstock Apple’s Find My service will help you locate your iPhone, iPad or other Apple device that has been lost, stolen or simply misplaced. It relies on Apple’s Find My network, which is a crowdsourced system where other people’s Apple devices use Bluetooth to detect the location of your item — in some cases, even when it’s switched off. It then reports the approximate location of the device to you. While the feature can…

Saving time is not the goal of AI. Spending it on something better is.