Author: Carter

Interfaze, a young YC’s startup, has open-sourced a new speech recognition model. It is called diffusion-gemma-asr-small. The model transcribes audio through a diffusion decoder, not an autoregressive one. It is described as the first multilingual audio diffusion ASR model. One adapter handles six languages. The research team trained only about 42M parameters on top of a frozen 26B backbone. That is roughly 0.16% of the model’s weights. Here two terms matter up front. Autoregressive models generate text one token at a time. Diffusion models refine all tokens in parallel. This model uses the diffusion approach for speech-to-text. TL;DR Claimed by…

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Dana Cazacu, Marketing Manager, VEXXHOST The core issue isn’t where your server sits. It’s who can be compelled to hand over what’s on it. For years, cloud providers treated sovereignty as a geography problem. Pick a region. Choose a country. Keep your data local. But laws such as the U.S. CLOUD Act changed the equation. Data access follows corporate control, not physical location. A hyperscaler operating infrastructure in Frankfurt remains subject to the laws governing its parent company. Region selection is a geographic control. Sovereignty is a jurisdictional one. That distinction is increasingly shaping…

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Amazon’s Prime Day event has come and gone, but Fourth of July discounts have arrived in time for back-to-school shopping. We’re tracking the best July 4th deals on MacBooks and Windows PCs from all the major brands: Acer, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and HP.Also: The best July 4 deals live now: Save on Anker, Garmin, Apple, and moreI only highlight laptops I’ve either tested personally or am familiar with, and suggest devices that have deals worth your time. Most of these devices were released within the last year, but if it’s older, I’ll call that…

The National Highway System. Source: Mark Sarmiento, U.S. Department of Transportation, ArcGIS Online On June 29, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act. It authorized the creation of a network that today carries nearly 25% of U.S. automotive traffic and moves trillions of dollars of freight annually. Quarterhill Inc. is among the companies now working to digitize that transport infrastructure. Seventy years after the 41,000-mi. (65,983.1 km) interstate network was launched, 72.2 million Americans will travel around Independence Day this week, according to AAA. Concerns include aging roads and bridges, securing and managing freight, and improving safety…

WebBrain is a free, open-source browser agent for Chrome and Firefox. It reads pages, extracts data, and automates multi-step tasks. Unlike most browser AI plugins, it can also run entirely on a local model. It is built by Emre Sokullu and licensed under MIT. The full source lives on GitHub.  Run the agent against a local model, and no page data leaves your machine. Connect a cloud API when you want more capability. What is WebBrain? WebBrain lives in your browser’s side panel. In Chrome it uses Manifest V3 and the sidePanel API. In Firefox it uses Manifest V2 and…

A new class of Wall Street securities has grown from an experiment into a multibillion-dollar market in under two years, and a June 2026 research report from BitcoinTreasuries.net argues the expansion has just begun. The report, produced in partnership with the DeFi protocol Apyx, tracks the rise of preferred shares issued by public companies and backed by their bitcoin holdings. Such shares now carry a combined market value of about $13 billion. That figure represents close to 1% of the $1.3 trillion global preferred market, a share the report’s authors expect to reach 3 to 5% by 2030 and as…

A new report from the Citizen Lab has revealed that former Member of the European Parliament Stelios Kouloglou had his mobile device repeatedly hacked with the notorious Pegasus spyware while serving on a committee that was tasked with investigating the abuse of such commercial surveillance tools in the bloc. “Through forensic analysis of his device, we found that the attackers could have had access to confidential documents and committee deliberations,” the Citizen Lab researchers John Scott-Railton, Bill Marczak, Bahr Abdul Razzak, Kate Pundyk, Siena Anstis, and Ron Deibert said. The infections have not been attributed to a particular government at…

When you run compute-intensive workloads like real-time analytics, batch processing, video encoding, scientific modeling, or CPU-based machine learning inference, every percentage point of performance matters. You need instances that deliver higher throughput per vCPU, faster memory access, and more network bandwidth, all while keeping your costs in check. Today I am happy to announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C9g and C9gd instances, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. C9g instances are compute-optimized and deliver up to 25% higher performance per vCPU compared to previous-generation C8g instances. They feature the fastest memory of any processor instance…

By Emily Stoddart A nation unprepared On the 24th of June 2026, Venezuela experienced two catastrophic earthquakes, leaving the country, infrastructure and economy devastated. The earthquakes, which started at 6.04pm local time and struck within a minute of each other, have caused over 1,900 confirmed deaths so far, though the United Nations warns that the final death toll could reach up to 10,000. As one of Latin America’s poorest and least earthquake-prone nations, Venezuela lacks a lot of the infrastructure and ‘earthquake culture’ that other richer and more geologically unstable countries have. Whilst places like California and Japan have strict…

The equipment needed to cut, strip, crimp and assemble wiring is always changing. Here’s a look at some of the latest products.Daniels Manufacturing Corp. achieved Qualified Products List (QPL) status for its 51 Series of 6-ton form crimp tools. That means the tools meet military standards for terminating large-gauge insulated and uninsulated terminals and contacts. All three heavy-duty tools are qualified to AS5259 standards for crimping terminals onto 8 to 2/0 AWG copper and aluminum wires. Each tool has a 340-degree rotating head to enhance maneuverability. Interchangeable die sets deliver optimal electrical integrity across a wide range of applications. Three…