Author: Carter

**Snowflake Volunteer: Turning Your Smartphone into a Tool for Internet Freedom** In an era where internet access is increasingly scrutinized and controlled, the fight for digital privacy has never been more critical. The Tor Project, alongside Android app studio Bloco and the Guardian Project, has introduced a groundbreaking solution to this challenge: **Snowflake Volunteer**. This innovative Android app empowers everyday users to join the battle against global censorship, transforming their smartphones into vital tools for internet freedom. — ### What is Snowflake Volunteer? Snowflake Volunteer is a standalone application designed to make it easy for anyone to contribute to the…

Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash, the newest model in its Flash tier, three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash. The model card describes it as a refinement of 3.6 Flash with algorithmic improvements to the core reasoning foundation — not a new pretraining run. It accepts text, images, audio, and video across a 1M-token context window, returns up to 64K output tokens, and supports customizable thinking configurations that trade quality against cost and latency. The knowledge cutoff stays at March 2026. The gains concentrate in three places: software engineering, document-heavy knowledge work, and web development. The sharper argument is price.…

SecurityWeek’s weekly cybersecurity news roundup offers a concise overview of important developments that may not receive full standalone coverage yet remain relevant to the broader threat landscape. This curated summary highlights key stories across vulnerability disclosures, emerging attack methods, policy updates, industry reports, and other noteworthy events to help readers maintain a well-rounded awareness of the evolving cybersecurity environment. Here are this week’s highlights:  Government AI platform deal sparks outrage The Defense Department’s recent award of an $821 million contract to Accenture Federal Services for its War Data Platform (WDP) is drawing criticism for allegedly undermining goals to rapidly adopt…

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.GM!Today’s top news: Crypto majors continue slide, BTC at $62.8k SEC delays meeting to discuss crypto regulation Trezor data breach exposes customer addresses Kalshi raising $750M at $40B valuation Lighter debuts $20M+ points program with Robinhood Wallet 🏦 Tether Finally Got a Real Audit, and KPMG Signed OffTether said Thursday that Big Four accounting firm KPMG issued an unqualified opinion (the best possible result) on its 2025 financial statements.Tether (the company behind the leading stablecoin USDT) called it…

Terry Gerton The government just announced it was taking equity stakes, totaling more than $800 million in seven companies in the semiconductor industry. I’m old enough to remember that government’s main role used to be fairly straightforward. It funded research, it set the rules, and it let the markets sort out the rest. What has changed now that has agencies taking direct stakes in companies instead of just providing incentives? Joel Fetter There’s really an evolution in how people are thinking about the relationship between the public and the private sector. And like you, I was raised on the idea…

For most of the last decade, the promise of IoT in industrial operations was visibility. Connect the assets, stream the data, put it on a dashboard and let operators see what was happening across a site in real time. The question now is what comes after visibility, and the answer reshaping oil and gas operations is autonomy: systems that move past detection into action, taking operational decisions without waiting for a human to read the alert. That trajectory is visible across two editions of the Oil and Gas Automation and Digitalisation Congress (AUTOMA). At AUTOMA 2025, a roundtable on IoT…

Cactus Compute has released Needle 2, an open 45M-parameter model for tool calling, device use, and structured extraction. The entire model ships as a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in about 28MB of RAM. Weights are trained and deployed at CQ2-bit using Cactus Quants, and the model is sealed inside the company’s own C++ engine, so there is no runtime to install and no download at inference time. Reported decode throughput is 500 tokens/sec on a Raspberry Pi 5, 400–1,500 tokens/sec on Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and 300–700 tokens/sec on sub-$200 phones. The design…

**My Day Looked Completely Different: How AI Transformed My Work as a Data Scientist** Two years ago, my days as a data scientist were a marathon of manual work. I wrote and debugged SQL queries and Python scripts line by line, spent hours building slide decks, and created documentation that rarely saw the light of day. It was exhausting, repetitive, and often frustrating. Today, my workflow looks completely different—not because I stopped doing the job, but because the tools I use evolved with me. This is my experience of how AI reshaped my daily routine. **Prompt Engineering Is a Major…

**Robots on Wall Street: Non-Traditional Paths to Public Markets for Robotics Companies** In a landmark transaction signaling a shift in how robotics companies access public markets, Agility Robotics recently announced a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), valuing the humanoid robotics firm at $2.5 billion pre-money. This move underscores a broader trend: robotics and automation firms are increasingly bypassing the traditional IPO route in favor of de-SPAC transactions and reverse mergers. Driven by capital intensity, regulatory hurdles, and competitive IPO markets, these alternative paths offer a viable, and sometimes preferable, route to public listing.…

**DecryptAds: Shedding Light on the Hidden World of Online Advertising** In today’s digital landscape, it can be daunting to determine who is responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit or who is harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. This information, while semi-public, is not easily parsed and has traditionally remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. However, a new powerful and free service called **DecryptAds** is changing that by scraping and correlating adtech data, making it simple to quickly learn about the entities tracking us. — ### What is DecryptAds? DecryptAds…