Latest Tech News

Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more

Filtered by: arch Clear Filter

Paid subreddits plan on hold as company prioritizes search engine plans

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed plans for paid subreddits earlier this year but now says that the initiative has been de–prioritized. However, he says that the company still believes in the opportunity, suggesting that a Reddit paywall of some kind will be introduced at some stage … Paid subreddits plan Huffman first hinted at the plan last year, but didn’t go into any details. We will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive con

How I configure BorgBackup and borgmatic (2023)

This article outlines how I configure BorgBackup and borgmatic on my machines. macOS Tested on MacBook Air M2 macOS Ventura 13.4.1 borgmatic 1.7.12 (MacPorts) moreutils 0.67_1 (MacPorts) borgmatic and moreutils are also available on Homebrew. Unlike systemd, launchctl doesn’t provide integration a syslog-like service. (I guess Apple expects you to use Console instead) Apple’s unified logging is unreliable and in many tests I have had messages disappearing, even when manually testing wit

Apple might be building its own AI ‘answer engine’

In Brief Apple has formed a new team to build a ChatGPT-like app, according to according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This team — reportedly called Answers, Knowledge, and Information — is working to build an “answer engine” that can respond to questions using information from across the web. This could be a standalone app or provide search capabilities in Siri, Safari, and other Apple products. Gurman also notes that Apple is advertising for jobs with this team, specifically looking for appli

Alarming New System Can Identify People Through Walls Using Wi-Fi Signal

Once upon a time, in their startling report titled "Bigger Monsters, Weaker Chains," ACLU analysts Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt argued that the US was quickly becoming a full-blown "surveillance society," where advanced technology and crumbling regulation come together to create the kind of world that was previously the domain of dystopian science fiction. "The fact is, there are no longer any technical barriers to the Big Brother regime portrayed by George Orwell," they wrote. That was in

Apple now looking to rival ChatGPT with a new in-house ‘Answers’ team: report

According to the latest edition of Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter, Apple has a new plan up its sleeve to rival the competition in the AI search space. This is a major pivot from Apple’s previous stance, where the company said it didn’t want to develop a chatbot. Apple Intelligence has been off to a rocky start, to say the least. The abilities that have shipped, such as Genmoji and Notification Summaries, haven’t exactly been stellar. Apple has still failed to ship its all-new Siri, and has s

Topics: ai apple new search year

Impossibly Intricate Tattoos Found on 2,000-Year-Old ‘Ice Mummy’

For the first time, archeologists have gotten a detailed look at the intricate tattoos on a 2,000-year-old ice mummy, found buried deep within the permafrost-covered mountains of Siberia. These tattoos would be challenging to produce even today, the researchers say, suggesting that ancient tattoo artists possessed a considerable degree of skill. With help from modern tattoo artists, an international team of researchers examined the mummy’s tattoos in unprecedented detail and identified the too

Great Tits Sometimes Break Up, Bird Researchers Find

We’re talking about the birds. Great tits are small, yellowish songbirds common to the woodlands of Europe. Tit pairs are known to be monogamous during breeding season, splitting up after fully raising their offspring. But new research suggests that this “tit divorce” may be the product of complex social relationships formed during and after the breeding season. Published July 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper reports that not all tit pairs separate in late summer when breedi

I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

July 30, 2025 , Nicholas Khami I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself For over a year, I was bugged by a search quirk on Mintlify that caused race conditions and wonky search results. Here’s the fun irony: I was the founder of Trieve, the company that powered search for their 30,000+ documentation sites, yet their debounced search queries weren’t being aborted as you typed. Check out this delightful chaos: I had brought this up in our shared Slack before when I was just a

Reddit Shifting Towards Search as Company Wants to Become a Search Engine

You may not need to add "Reddit" to your Google searches for much longer -- now, you can go straight to the source. In his Q2 letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the company will integrate its search function with Reddit Answers, which is currently available in the US and 11 other countries, "into a single search experience." Reddit will make the search box more visible on the app, bringing it "front and center." "Whether you're a new user opening the app for the first time

Fundamental Research Labs nabs $30M+ to build AI agents across verticals

Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised its seed funding, Fundametal Research Labs was developing bots that could play Minecraft with you. Today, the company has a games team, a prosumer team

AI-powered Cursor IDE vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks

A vulnerability that researchers call CurXecute is present in almost all versions of the AI-powered code editor Cursor, and can be exploited to execute remote code with developer privileges. The security issue is now identified as CVE-2025-54135 and can be leveraged by feeding the AI agent a malicious prompt to trigger attacker-control commands. The Cursor integrated development environment (IDE) relies on AI agents to help developers code faster and more efficiently, allowing them to connect

Belgium bans Internet Archive's ‘Open Library’

The Business Court in Brussels, Belgium, has issued an unprecedentedly broad site-blocking order that aims to restrict access to shadow libraries including Anna's Archive, Libgen, OceanofPDF, Z-Library, and the Internet Archive's Open Library. In addition to ISP blocks, the order also directs search engines, DNS resolvers, advertisers, domain name services, CDNs and hosting companies to take action. Traditional site-blocking measures that require local ISPs to block subscriber access to popular

Belgium Bans Internet Archive's 'Open Library' in Site Blocking Order

The Business Court in Brussels, Belgium, has issued an unprecedentedly broad site-blocking order that aims to restrict access to shadow libraries including Anna's Archive, Libgen, OceanofPDF, Z-Library, and the Internet Archive's Open Library. In addition to ISP blocks, the order also directs search engines, DNS resolvers, advertisers, domain name services, CDNs and hosting companies to take action. Traditional site-blocking measures that require local ISPs to block subscriber access to popular

Reddit plans to unify its search interface as it looks to become a search engine

With search today so full of AI slop and sites spamming SEO tricks, it’s not unusual for people to append “reddit” to their queries in hopes of finding useful answers to their questions. Google has tried to integrate results from Reddit in its search interface, and taking notice of the trend, Reddit has been experimenting with its own AI search as well. But the company has loftier ambitions: it wants to become the go-to search engine people use. Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, said as much during

Reddit should be a 'go-to search engine,' Steve Huffman says

Reddit is going to be leaning even harder into search in the coming months. The company has already been working on a plan to integrate its LLM-powered search into its main search feature, but CEO Steve Huffman said he wants users to think of the site as an actual search engine. During the company's latest earnings call, Huffman said search is one of the top priorities for Reddit. "We're concentrating our resources on the areas that will drive results for our most pressing needs, improving the

Horrifyingly Huge New Stick Insect Discovered Exactly Where You Think

Australia is famous for hosting the weirdest creatures we’ve ever seen. Sometimes, these weird creatures also come extra-large—like the newly discovered stick insect that researchers believe may be the heaviest of all Aussie insects. The insect, named Acrohylla alta, is about 15 inches (40 centimeters) long—about the height of a bowling pin—and weighs around 0.1 pounds (44 grams), slightly lighter than the heaviest golf ball. In a recent Zootaxa paper, wildlife researchers Angus Emmott and Ross

Reddit wants to be a search engine now

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Reddit knows that it has valuable data from actual people — it’s already reached deals with big AI companies like OpenAI and Google to share its data with them. But Reddit is also investing in improving its own search capabilities, and in its latest note to investors, CEO Steve Huffman says that the company is “concentrating our resources on the areas that will drive results f

Your public ChatGPT queries are getting indexed by Google and other search engines

It’s a strange glimpse into the human mind: If you filter search results on Google, Bing, and other search engines to only include URLs from the domain “https://chatgpt.com/share,” you can find strangers’ conversations with ChatGPT. Sometimes, these shared conversation links are pretty dull — people ask for help renovating their bathroom, understanding astrophysics, and finding recipe ideas. In another case, one user asks ChatGPT to rewrite their resume for a particular job application (judgin

You’ve heard of AI ‘Deep Research’ tools…now Manus is launching ‘Wide Research’ that spins up 100+ agents to scour the web for you

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Chinese AI startup Manus, which made headlines earlier this year for its approach to a multi-agent orchestration platform for consumers and “pro”-sumers (professionals wanting to run work operations), is back with an interesting new use of its technology. While many other major rival AI providers such as OpenAI, Google, and xAI that have l

Gemini Embedding: Powering RAG and context engineering

Since announcing the general availability of our Gemini Embedding text model, we've seen developers rapidly adopt it to build advanced AI applications. Beyond traditional use cases like classification, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), many are now using a technique called context engineering to provide AI agents with complete operational context. Embeddings are crucial here, as they efficiently identify and integrate vital information—like documents, conversation histor

Google search flaw allows articles to vanish through "clever" censorship tactics

In context: Online censorship can take many forms and due to its dominance in web search, Google has traditionally been the primary target. A recently uncovered case highlights the lengths to which reputation management companies will go, as well as Google's vulnerability to sophisticated censorship tactics. Someone successfully censored a pair of uncomfortable articles that were previously accessible through Google Search. The unknown party exploited a clever trick along with a bug in Google's

How Not to Study a Disease (2023)

Image credit: @ionut.stefan.92ish Română In today’s post, I’d like to draw your attention to an absolutely amazing book on the topic of Alzheimer’s disease. Written by Prof. Karl Herrup, professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, “How Not to Study a Disease – The Story of Alzheimer’s” takes the reader on a journey of Alzheimer’s research from its inception by Alois Alzheimer to the contemporary understanding of this devastating condition. This is not just an

The Download: OpenAI’s future research, and US climate regulation is under threat

—Will Douglas Heaven For the past couple of years, OpenAI has felt like a one-man brand. With his showbiz style and fundraising glitz, CEO Sam Altman overshadows all other big names on the firm’s roster. But Altman is not the one building the technology on which its reputation rests. That responsibility falls to OpenAI’s twin heads of research—chief research officer Mark Chen and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki. Between them, they share the role of making sure OpenAI stays one step ahead of

AI Is Taking Over Your Search Engine. Here's What It's Doing and Why It Matters

For decades, the way we find information on the internet changed only in small ways. Doing a traditional Google search today doesn't feel all that different from when, in the 1990s, you would Ask Jeeves. Sure, a lot has changed under the hood, the results are likely far more relevant and the interface has some new features, but you're still typing in keywords and getting a list of websites that might hold the answer. That way of searching, it seems, is starting to go the way of AltaVista, may i

Google tool misused to scrub tech CEO’s shady past from search

Google is fond of saying its mission is to "organize the world's information," but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization? A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google's search index, and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he's still at it. Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one of Google's search tools to scrub the offending articles. The saga began in 2023

$15 billion in NIH funding frozen, then thawed Tuesday in ongoing power war

Amid the Trump administration's ongoing efforts to wrest the power of the purse from Congress, an estimated $15 billion allotted by lawmakers to fund life-saving biomedical research via the National Institutes of Health was temporarily frozen and then said to be released Tuesday. According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the initial decision to withhold the funding came from Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump administration and Project 202

Google upgrades AI Mode with Canvas and 3 other new features - how to try them

Google Love it or hate it, Google's AI Mode has revamped the way you search for information. Instead of presenting you with tens of thousands of website links, Google serves up an AI-generated overview and summary of the results. Also: Sick of AI in your search results? Try these 7 Google alternatives with old-school, AI-free charm That can save you time and labor by cutting to the chase. But it can also steer you away from the publishers and websites that do the actual work and potentially p

Topics: ai ask google mode search

Hexatetrahedral Rails

Software is a creative endeavor and a craft. And like any creative endeavor and any craft, it is subject to fashions. About a decade ago, one of those fashions was Hexagonal Rails largely inspired by the DDD book, but also by the original Hexagonal Architecture work by Dr. Cockburn. Some of these applications are now up for their Rails upgrade and an “oil change,” and it’s interesting to see them in the wild and how they get perceived through the lens of the years that have gone by since then.

ACM Transitions to Full Open Access

ACM's Transition to Full Open Access: A New Era for Computing Research For more than seven decades, ACM has played a pivotal role in advancing computing research, fostering collaboration, and disseminating knowledge through its world-class Digital Library, influential publications, and premier conferences. In a significant step to broadening access to computing research, ACM is transitioning to a fully Open Access (OA) publishing model by the end of 2025. This bold move marks a pivotal moment

Sick of AI in your search results? Try these 7 Google alternatives with old-school, AI-free charm

Elyse Betters Picaro (with graphic elements from Paolo Boaretto, Sparklestroke Global, and Cosmic Latte via Canva) / ZDNET I don't know about you, but I'm tired of seeing AI used in place of actual search results in my web browser or used to summarize whatever I'm looking for. Google has become useless because of this, and other popular search engines are following close behind. With more and more search tools turning to AI, what can you do? Are there alternatives that aren't pushing AI front