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US feds are reportedly investigating a $32 million deal inked by CrowdStrike with a government reseller to provide cybersecurity tools for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) — products the agency never used and said it didn’t even purchase. On the last day of Q3 2023, the security giant signed a contract with top government software reseller Carahsoft Technology Corp. for use of its identity threat detection software by the IRS, according to a Bloomberg report. The timing seems to be a critical component of the investigation, as the transaction was large enough for CrowdStrike to meet Wall Street expectations for the quarter. Given that IRS usage hasn’t materialized, som

Amazon’s announcement on Wednesday that it is abandoning its Chime collaboration app, while stressing that it will double down on the far more successful Chime software development kit (SDK), was an example of Amazon being Amazon. It knows what it does well, and where to focus. Analysts said that the Chime app made some sense when it was introduced in February 2017, but that sharply changed in 2000 when the pandemic hit. Microsoft and Zoom added lots of new functionality to their colla

As of 10 a.m. (ET) today, Apple is no longer offering new users in the UK the chance to enable Advanced Data Protection. Essentially, anyone who now wants to enable the feature to protect their data against criminal or state surveillance or exfiltration will no longer be able to do so. The move appears to be a direct response to the foolish and supremely dangerous demand by the UK government to undermine personal data security on an international scale

Microsoft has launched Magma, a new generative AI (genAI) model that can be used to control everything from software to robots. The company says Magma is the first such model that can act on its own based on multimodal data such as texts, images, and video. It can, for example, use an interface or handle physical objects,

Tech press-landi and the tech blogosphere were abuzz last week with news that both Apple, the company that makes the iPhone, and Meta, the company that makes everybody on Facebook confront a daily flood of horrible AI-generated slop, are making full-size, humanoid robots. The trouble is, they’re not doing that. Here’s what’s really happening.  Don’t call Apple’s robot the “iRobot” TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote on the X social network on Feb. 12 that “Apple is explori

Windows 11 24H2 has been released, but behind the scenes, Microsoft is constantly working to improve the newest version of Windows. The company frequently rolls out public preview builds to members of its Windows Insider Program, allowing them to test out — and even help shape — upcoming features. Skip to the builds The Windows Insider program is divided into four channels: The Canary Channel is where platform changes (such as major updates to the Windows kernel and new APIs) are previewed. These changes are not tied to a particular Windows release and may never ship at all. Little

Perplexity is releasing its model R1 1776, a version of Deepseek R1 with open model weights that has been post-trained to remove China’s censorship and provide more unbiased, accurate answers, according to Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas. He

Google and Zoom this week announced new AI features in their videoconferencing apps  that the companies said are aimed at improving employee productivity. The updates focus on automating tasks during and after a videoconference.  Google Meet now has a feature that advises users on possible next steps to take after a videoconferencing call ends. And Zoom added a new set of AI tools called Workplace Automation that automates common tasks after a mee

Emerging technologies such as connected transport, quantum sensing, healthcare diagnostics, and synthetic AI-driven content are creating huge gaps in data protection and privacy that could quickly outpace the ability of regulators and enterprises to contain them. It’s a possibility that emerges from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office’s (ICO’s) latest Tech Horizons report 2025, which examines how these

There’s a lot to like about Apple’s newest $599 iPhone 16e, but one of the more interesting features in the device is the Apple-designed 5G modem. Apple has spent at least seven years developing the chip, but gave it just a few short seconds of time when it announced the smartphone this week. (That’s not a great deal of time for a component that represents such a design challenge.) Here is what we know so far about Apple’s all-new C1 subsystem. Introducing the C1 chip At the heart of the syst