Author: Carter

Maria Diaz/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysPlug-in solar systems are an alternative to large, professionally installed rooftop solar.The US regulatory system for utilities wasn’t built for plug-and-play solar setups, so it’s taking time for state laws to catch up.Thus far, only Utah has legalized plug-in solar in the US, allowing small systems of up to 1,200w to plug directly into a traditional outlet.Plug-in solar has risen in popularity among sustainability fans in recent years, but the practice isn’t yet legal in all of the United States. If you’ve been thinking about joining the plug-in solar bandwagon,…

For years, AI inside software meant a chat widget bolted onto the corner of an application. You typed, the model responded with text, and you manually translated that output into whatever you actually needed it to do. It was useful the way a calculator is useful: functional, but fundamentally passive. CopilotKit, a Seattle-based startup co-founded by Atai Barkai and Uli Barkai, has spent the last two years arguing that the model is broken — and in 2026, the developer community is agreeing loudly. Give CopilotKit a ⭐️ on GitHub The company’s approach is straightforward: the way forward is to enable…

Microsoft Research’s AI Frontiers lab has introduced Fara1.5, a series of computer-use agent (CUA) models designed for web browsing. This release includes three variants: Fara1.5-4B, Fara1.5-9B, and Fara1.5-27B. These models work seamlessly with MagenticLite, Microsoft’s secure browser environment built specifically for these agents. Computer-use agents are visual-action systems that control an actual browser. They analyze screenshots and generate mouse and keyboard inputs to accomplish tasks. Modern agent tools such as OpenAI’s Operator and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Computer Use belong to this category. Fara1.5-27B achieves a 72% task completion rate on Online-Mind2Web. This benchmark evaluates performance across 300 tasks on 136…

In brief Bank of America maintains its “buy” recommendation on Nvidia and increases its price target to $350 following a record-breaking Q1 revenue of $81.6 billion. BofA projects the AI market will exceed $3 trillion by 2030, with an additional $200 billion CPU opportunity and $145 billion in confirmed customer orders. BofA identifies Nvidia’s primary risk as its massive scale: The company now represents 8.3% of the S&P 500. Nvidia just posted the largest quarterly revenue in its entire history. Yet the stock dropped anyway. This has become a recurring trend—the chipmaker’s shares have fallen following three of its last…

On Wednesday, Canadian officials arrested a 23-year-old man from Ottawa for allegedly creating and running Kimwolf, a rapidly expanding Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet that hijacked millions of devices to carry out a wave of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months. In February 2026, KrebsOnSecurity publicly identified the suspect after he launched a series of DDoS attacks, doxing attempts, and swatting incidents targeting this reporter and a security researcher. He now faces criminal hacking charges in both Canada and the United States. A criminal complaint unsealed today in an Alaska district court charges Jacob Butler, also known as…

U.S. national laboratories tackle some of the nation’s most demanding—though often underappreciated—high-stakes innovation projects. This work demands intense concentration from scientists, researchers, and specialists who are developing breakthroughs and solutions to the most pressing threats we face now and in the future. In these high-pressure environments, every team member contributes to accelerating progress, no matter their specific role. This critical work requires robust support systems. Idaho National Lab’s CIO Mark Holterman is fully committed, as are his IT team and their partners. “The key is building strong partnerships with mission teams, making sure they have all the resources they need…

Glass processing equipment is among the most significant capital investments a manufacturer can undertake. A single CNC grinding center, fusion splicing platform, precision molding system, or connected industrial automation platform can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the components processed on these machines often carry tolerances measured in nanometers. In modern industrial IoT environments, these systems are increasingly connected to monitoring platforms, predictive maintenance tools and production analytics infrastructure. When equipment performance drifts or fails, the cost shows up immediately in the form of scrapped parts, missed deadlines, unplanned downtime and disrupted production data flows.The good news is that…

  # Introduction  Here is something that should shift how you think about AI model size: a 4-billion-parameter model released in early 2025 is now outscoring models that were 7x larger on standard reasoning benchmarks. Google’s Gemma 3 4B posts an 89.2% on GSM8K math reasoning. Microsoft’s Phi-4-mini at 3.8B hits 83.7% on ARC-C, the highest score in its entire size class. These numbers used to belong to 30B+ models. So the question “do I really need a 70B model for this?” deserves a second look. For the purposes of this article, “small” means under 7 billion parameters — models that…

Back in 2022, the landscape looked completely different. Younger folks today have no idea what that era was like. I’d pour countless hours into: Manually crafting Python and SQL code, line after line Committing to memory which libraries to bring in and the specific functions within them (like from sklearn.metrics import r2_score) Tracking down and fixing code bugs Creating documentation to explain my code Assembling dashboards to examine massive datasets Even within just the past 12 months, as AI-powered tools have grown more and more sophisticated, my role as a data scientist has shifted. I’ve moved away from being purely…

Posted on May 21, 2026 by Yash Pimple & Rohit Ghumare, CNCF Ambassadors Welcome to Mumbai KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India lands in Mumbai on 18-19 June 2026, at the Jio World Convention Centre in BKC. Thousands of cloud native engineers are flying in, many of you for the first time, and you’re landing in the middle of monsoon season. Both of us were born and brought up in Mumbai. Yash still lives here. Rohit moved to London and goes back and forth. The bigger reason we wrote it: in 2022, Rohit started Cloud Native Thane (@cncfthane) to bring the CNCF…