Author: Carter

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysMicrosoft Defender Antivirus is 99% effective at blocking threats.Data suggests most infections are due to user behavior.Businesses need specialized endpoint security software.Last April, someone at Microsoft published a document on the Windows Learning Center that made a thoroughly uncontroversial claim: “For many Windows 11 users, Microsoft Defender Antivirus covers everyday risk without requiring additional software. The choice to add third‑party antivirus depends on how you use your PC and which features you value.”The article drove a flurry of coverage from tech blogs, but the hullabaloo died down in a few days.Also: How to get free Windows…

The Bank of England is reviewing whether existing rules can cover the use of agentic AI in finance, including payments, trading, cybersecurity, and operations.Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden said existing regulatory frameworks were not designed for AI agents that can act without direct human instruction. Speaking at the European Central Bank Forum on central banking in Portugal, she said relying on human oversight for every action by these systems is unlikely to be practical.Breeden said current frameworks were not built to contemplate autonomous agents in payments, trading, and operational functions.Agentic AI enters financial workflowsAgentic AI refers to systems that can make…

In brief Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on Tuesday at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, after which pricing reverts to $3/$15—still a fraction of Opus 4.8’s $5/$25 rate. On Anthropic’s own evaluations, Sonnet 5 is virtually tied Opus 4.8 on the GDPval-AA v2 knowledge-work benchmark. Sonnet 5 ships with no special restrictions while Fable 5 and Mythos 5 remain suspended for general usage under a June 12 export control directive. Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on Tuesday, calling it “the most agentic Sonnet model yet.” It’s the default model for Free…

Frontier AI is a popular topic of late. Indeed, the impact of Frontier AI to the way we identify, mitigate, and patch vulnerabilities is far reaching. It is nearly certain that the security profession will need to evolve as a result. That evolution already appears to be underway in many enterprises. In my experience, enterprises have two high-level concerns around Frontier AI: Regarding their own applications, they are concerned that they will not be able to keep up with the increased pace of identifying, mitigating, and patching vulnerabilities Regarding their vendors, they want to understand how Frontier AI affects product…

NVIDIA has released Nemotron-Labs-TwoTower, a diffusion language model built on a pretrained autoregressive backbone. It ships as open weights under the NVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License. The release targets a throughput bottleneck in text generation. Autoregressive (AR) models decode one token at a time. That serial process caps generation throughput. Discrete diffusion language models take another route. They generate tokens in parallel and refine them iteratively. Most diffusion language models use one network for two jobs. It represents clean tokens and denoises corrupted ones at every step. TwoTower separates these jobs into two towers. It keeps 98.7% of the AR…

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Niki Manoledaki (Grafana Labs), Sunyanan Choochotkaew (IBM) | CNCF Ambassadors CNCF projects highlighted in this post Thank you to Laura Llinares, Mary Baldwin Hughes, Vimal Kumar, and Sunil Thaha for their significant contributions to this blog post and the Kepler project. Data centers accounted for 1.5% of global electricity demand in 2024, which is projected to double to around 945 TWh by 2030, driven in part by rapid growth in AI workloads according to the International Energy Agency’s “Energy and AI” report published in 2025. In Kubernetes clusters, there is no easy built-in method…

Rocket Lab Corporation and Iridium Communications announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Rocket Lab will acquire Iridium. Rocket Lab will acquire all the outstanding shares of Iridium common stock for $54 per share in a cash and stock transaction. This represents an enterprise value for Iridium of approximately $8.0 billion. The acquisition will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry, joining together two innovative American companies to play a leading role in the US space economy. It merges Rocket Lab’s launch capabilities and satellite manufacturing with Iridium’s global satellite communications network, spectrum, and 500-plus…

No, It’s Not the “Easy” Round in on interviews at my previous company, I used to think the behavioral part of the interview was the easy part. That if someone was technically proficient and could wow the interviewers with their analytical mind, they’d be the top contender for any job. Then I witnessed a highly technically skilled applicant lose out to a more socially competent one. Not because he lacked experience. He had done good work, and he obviously knew what he was doing. He just had no idea how to tell us about what he’d done in a way…

With Bitcoin plunging below $60,000 and Strategy’s share price down by more than 70% from the high, some crypto investors are questioning if Strategy could become this cycle’s Terra/LUNA — a highly leveraged bet on crypto market structure that explodes under stress.The company’s response? A new capital framework released on Monday aimed at addressing investors’ fears.The package includes up to $1 billion in buybacks for MSTR, up to $1 billion in buybacks for STRC and related securities, an increase in STRC’s dividend to roughly 12%, and a cash buffer expansion to $2.55 billion. Of particular note for a company famed…

New Microsoft research shows how attackers can hijack AI agents that act on a user’s behalf, using nothing more than a poisoned tool description to make the agent quietly hand over company data to an outsider. The trick is that the agent never breaks a rule. Every step looks routine, so in a default setup no alarm may fire. The work comes from Microsoft Incident Response and its Defender security research team, and it lands as companies start letting AI do more than read and summarize. What changes when an agent can act Until recently, the workplace AI risk was mostly framed…