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Tech News
Microsoft is shifting from its three-segment business reporting structure to two new categories: Agents and Infra, and Devices and Consumer. The company says the change reflects how artificial intelligence is reshaping its products and operations.
An early build of Google's Device Intelligence app, discovered ahead of the Googlebook laptop launch, reveals an opt-in feature that automatically groups related local files into topic-based collections, such as trip planning documents. These collections can be viewed through desktop widgets, and Google states the sorting happens on-device without files leaving the machine or being used for AI training.
A retrospective on OpenBSD's history blog describes SMD (Storage Module Device) disks, a storage interface standardized in 1982 and revised in 1987, which powered high-capacity systems throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The piece details how Sun Microsystems used SMD disks paired with Xylogics controllers in its early high-end servers and workstations, noting the drives' massive size, weight, and power draw compared to later interfaces like ESDI and SCSI.
A new Practical Engineering video explains why railroad crossings need extensive automated warning systems: trains can take up to a mile to stop, far exceeding an engineer's sight distance, so safety depends entirely on detection equipment rather than driver reaction. The video, part of a broader series on railroads, walks through how these systems sense an approaching train and alert motorists in time to clear the tracks.
The piece critiques the romanticized idea of disappearing into private, isolated effort—'the Cave'—citing examples like Michael Phelps's Under Armour ad and personal wrestling experience. The author argues that smart devices, recommendation algorithms, and AI reinforce this isolation by feeding people what they already believe rather than challenging them.
Google has fixed a bug in its Home app that was preventing owners of older Chromecast and Chromecast Audio devices from setting them up. The company confirmed the fix in a Reddit thread and advised affected users to update to Google Home app version 4.26 or later and retry setup. Those still experiencing issues are encouraged to contact Google support.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled a one-year moratorium starting in the 2026-2027 school year that blocks roughly 600,000 students from pre-K through eighth grade from using AI in class, and bars teachers from using AI to grade their work. Companion and mental-support chatbots will be prohibited at all grade levels, individual screens are banned until third grade, and screen time guidance caps middle schoolers at 45 minutes daily. High schoolers will get limited AI access, twice-yearly AI literacy lessons, and a small pilot program testing vetted AI tools in a handful of classrooms.
Mozilla has rolled out a new feature called Ad Blocker within Firefox for iPhone and iPad, designed to stop many third-party ads and ad trackers from loading on web pages. The tool is off by default and must be manually switched on through Settings > Browsing > Ad Blocker, and it requires iOS or iPadOS 15 or later. Mozilla says the rollout is gradual, so not every user will see the option immediately.
Perplexity has launched a hybrid compute feature for its Computer agentic platform that splits AI tasks between cloud-based frontier models and smaller open-weight models running locally on Apple silicon Macs. Sensitive data is automatically routed to the on-device model via a locally-run 'Privacy Gate' classifier that detects personal information before anything reaches the cloud, without interrupting the task or losing context. The feature launches today for opted-in enterprise customers plus Pro and Max subscribers on Macs running macOS 15 or later.
Google confirmed that Device Help, a Gemini feature that lets users describe what they want their phone to do and have Gemini adjust settings automatically, isn't limited to the Pixel 11 series. A Google employee showed the feature working on other Pixel devices running Android 17, and said support will expand to additional devices over time.
XCENA partnered with Samsung to build the MX1, a CXL 3.2 device that can expand host memory by up to 2TB of DDR5 while also connecting SSDs and performing on-board computation. The chip, made on Samsung's 4nm process, packs 3072 small RISC-V cores organized into 24 independently schedulable subsystems, alongside two Arm Cortex A53 cores for control, and draws about 40W on the chip and 90W for the full board with DIMMs.
The report clarifies that caches are temporary storage used by browsers and apps to avoid re-downloading or recreating data like images, playlists and thumbnails. It notes there is no single universal cache on a device, since browsers, individual apps and the system each maintain separate caches for different purposes.