Author: Carter

**Federal Retirement Processing Faces Delays as OPM Inventory Hits Year-Low** The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) recently released data showing a significant shift in its retirement processing landscape. While the agency’s retirement claim inventory reached its lowest point of the year in June—with just under 34,000 pending applications—processing times simultaneously slowed. According to the latest figures, it took OPM an average of 108 days to process a retirement claim last month, a substantial increase of 30 days from the previous month. For digital-only applications, the average processing time was 96 days. This juxtaposition of fewer claims but longer processing times…

**The Best HDMI Cables for Your Entertainment Setup in 2026** A poor HDMI cable can ruin your entertainment setup, causing flickering screens, dropped signals, or laggy gameplay. If you’re streaming in 4K, gaming at high frame rates, or juggling multiple displays, a reliable connection is key. Sadly, some manufacturers cut corners on materials or bandwidth, which leads to frustrating signal drops and degraded image quality. I tested the best HDMI cables to ensure you get crystal-clear audio and video. — ### What is the Best HDMI Cable Right Now? My top recommendation for the best HDMI cable is the **AmazonBasics…

**Android’s Linux App Revolution: Running Full Linux Apps on Android** ================================================================================ By Jack WallenJack Wallen is an award-winning writer for ZDNET and TechRepublic. Jack brings more than two decades of experience writing about tech and has covered everything from enterprise to consumer Linux, Windows, and everything in between. Jack is currently ZDNET’s Android and Linux expert. Jack Wallen/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Android is very close to being a full-blown Linux desktop. With the ability to run Linux apps, the OS takes a major step forward. But there is one glaring…

**Entra Passkey Phishing: How Attackers Are Abusing Microsoft’s New Security Feature** A threat actor has been actively targeting organizations across multiple sectors—food and beverage, technology, healthcare, automotive, construction, and aviation—with a sophisticated voice-based phishing campaign. The goal: trick Microsoft 365 users into enrolling a malicious Entra passkey, enabling data extortion and account compromise. The campaign, tracked by Okta under the designation **O-UNC-066**, leverages a custom phishing kit that mimics Microsoft’s legitimate passkey enrollment process. Security firm Okta’s researcher Houssem Eddine Bordjiba revealed that the attacker registers domains containing the word “passkey” and uses vishing (voice phishing) to persuade targets to…

**Harness AI to Create and Promote TikTok Shop Ad Workflows** In 2025, TikTok Shop generated $64.3 billion in global sales, nearly doubling year-over-year, with most sales driven by short, face-to-camera videos. However, creating these videos no longer requires a person, a phone, or extensive setup. With a product photo and three AI tools—GPT Image 2, ChatGPT, and Google Flow’s Gemini Omni—a complete AI ad can be produced for roughly a dollar or less. CapCut handles the final trim and subtitles, while YouTube’s Shopping affiliate program now opens at just 500 subscribers. This article outlines a step-by-step workflow to create, polish,…

**The Rise of the AI Scientists: How AI is Revolutionizing Scientific Research** In 2010, Euan Ashley, a geneticist and cardiologist at Stanford University in California, led the first clinical analysis of a human genome, which took his team of 31 scientists nine months to complete. This week, while unpacking after a holiday, Ashley asked the AI tool Claude, developed by Anthropic in San Francisco, to examine his own genome to the same standard. The analysis took just 30 minutes and correctly identified an Alzheimer’s disease risk allele and gene variants affecting drug metabolism. Ashley had analyzed his genome in 2012…

**Understanding the New Federal Suitability Rule: Changes, Concerns, and Legal Implications** In a significant shift in federal employment policy, the Trump administration has introduced new rules that alter how federal agencies can determine the “suitability” of their employees. The changes, discussed recently by Eric White and Michael Fallings, a managing partner at Tully Rinckey, mark a departure from long-standing practices regarding due process and employee rights. Below, we break down the key aspects of the new rule, its implications, and the legal questions it raises. — ### What Does “Suitability” Mean in Federal Employment? Traditionally, “suitability” refers to whether a…

**Article: The Best Email Hosting for Small Businesses in 2026** Running a business from a laptop in a coffee shop or across time zones is the reality for many modern freelancers and remote teams. While a free Gmail or Outlook.com address might suffice in the beginning, it quickly becomes inadequate when you’re invoicing clients or trying to project the image of a established operation. What you need is professional email hosting—one that makes your business look credible without requiring an IT department you don’t have. After reviewing the platforms most commonly used by freelancers and small remote teams, here’s what…

## The Power of Orchestration: How to Run 100+ Coding Agents in Parallel In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-assisted development, the true power of coding agents lies not just in their individual capabilities, but in their ability to work together at scale. I’ll discuss how to orchestrate a lot of different agents using Claude Code or any other coding agents, and how you can move up an additional abstraction level to manage them effectively. ### Why Orchestrate Multiple Agents? The primary benefit of orchestrating multiple agents is simple: **doing more work in less time**. When you work with coding…

**Free VPN Apps Are Failing at Security, New Study Finds** A new study led by researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of New Mexico, and IIT Delhi has revealed serious security flaws in many popular free Android VPN applications. The researchers tested 281 of the most-downloaded free VPN apps from the Google Play Store using a new automated auditing framework called MVPNalyzer. The results indicate that a large number of these apps fail at the basic promises they make to users: ensuring privacy and security. ### The Critical Flaws: Privacy and Security Failures The study found that numerous…