Windows 11 is solid out of the box, but it doesn’t always get things right. You can get a lot more out of the OS when you enable some things and disable others.

GTA VI could be yours for free, or at least for a big discount, using a few tricks that Xbox offers.

Whether you do a full shutdown or just put your MacBook to sleep should change with the circumstances we discuss here.

OpenAI’s agents targeted websites operated by the Commerce Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Education during testing.

“Copilot+ PCs” were Microsoft’s official branding for Windows 11 “AI PCs” that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch “didn’t go smoothly,” writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed “Recall” feature was woefully insecure:

This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand, and over the last two years more and more OEMs have dropped the moniker from marketing materials and product names. In fact, even Microsoft has seemingly stopped mentioning it. I’ve noticed that none of the Surface PCs launched in 2026 include the Copilot+ PC moniker in their product names, unlike the Surface PCs that launched in 2025 and before. Now, you have to go digging to find any mention of Copilot+ compatibility in specification sheets… It’s also worth mentioning that NVIDIA hasn’t gone anywhere near the Copilot+ PC brand for its upcoming RTX Spark platform, even though all RTX Spark PCs meet the Copilot+ PC specification bar. I suspect that’s a deliberate decision.

It seems pretty obvious that the Copilot+ PC brand hasn’t resonated with the market, and OEMs and Microsoft itself are now quietly pulling back on that branding. The specification baseline for Copilot+ PC experiences still exists, it just no longer has a pretty marketing name tied to it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A roundup of recent reviews from Engadget.

Plus, a major Ball x Pit expansion and a release date for a game I can’t wait to play more of.

53 images that users uploaded into OpenAI models were included in training data — and then AI agents in an OpenAI research environment posted those 53 images on public image hosting sites.
While posted as links that weren’t publicly listed, “the images could still be discovered even if the links were not publicly listed,” reports TechCrunch:

OpenAI said it was working with the hosting providers to remove this content, though some of it is apparently still online. OpenAI said it could not notify the affected users because “our technical approach and privacy policy” prevent it from “reassociating” the images with the original providers, but declined to say how the lab determined whether the images were provided by users.

The news came in a post collecting public statements from the lab’s ongoing review of incidents in which its models escaped the company’s scrutiny, accessed the open internet, and misbehaved in various ways. OpenAI said it would continue disclosing anonymized accounts of incidents like these, and said it had contacted dozens of victims, including governments, universities, public agencies, to notify them of the agents’ activities.

Friday night news also broke that OpenAI’s agents also tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate the U.S. Department of Education’s site this summer “without the company’s knowledge,” reports Politico.

And OpenAI’s models also accessed the website of the U.S. Commerce Department using credentials found in online code repositories, according to the article. OpenAI confirmed the incident Friday, “saying its technology did not manage to access information that was not already public or change government data and systems.” The article adds that OpenAI’s models also accessed the web site for America’s Securities and Exchange Commission:

One senior federal IT official said the government still did not have a clear understanding of what happened across the three agencies. “We still don’t know what public data was accessed and how it was accessed, because OpenAI has not shared specific technical details with us yet,” said the official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it. OpenAI discovered the Commerce and SEC incidents as part of its ongoing review of incidents where its technology has acted in unintended or “misaligned” ways.

About the models posting user-uploaded images, TechCrunch’s article notes that OpenAI stressed “that its enterprise users are automatically opted out of having their interactions used to train future models; however, consumer users are opted in unless they affirmatively choose not to share their data.” (As OpenAI’s announcement describes it, some of their agents’ training data “contains content from, or derived from, training-eligible user interactions.”)

Posting the images is “not an appropriate use of this data,” OpenAI acknowledged, adding that it happened before new safeguards added after the Hugging Face incident. This latest incident appears as an update on a new OpenAI page that “brings together our reports and updates on the Hugging Face incident, related research and public presentations, additional activity we have identified, what we have learned about the role of model misalignment, and measures we’re taking to strengthen our systems.” (It also notes that there’s now a name for models posting on third party sites — “agent spam” — which they consider distinct from cybersecurity, though “we need to address both.”)

“As part of our response to our ongoing investigation, we have improved our training and evaluation processes, including building safety cases, securing and red-teaming our systems to prevent the model from exfiltrating data, and implemented additional monitoring. We are continuing to review agent activity in research and evaluation runs, working backward month by month starting from the Hugging Face incident.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Heidi Overton, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, went before the Senate health committee Thursday, facing questions about her stances on vaccines, flavored vapes, birth control, and abortion, among other issues. She spent nearly two hours stonewalling senators, even on softball questions.

Overton, a physician with a doctoral degree in clinical investigation, is currently the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. She previously worked at a conservative think tank and has taken a clear stance opposing abortion, raising obvious questions about her objectivity. The FDA is currently reviewing the safety of the abortion pill, mifepristone, despite extensive data showing it is extremely safe.

Overton also notably stood behind President Trump at a press conference in August during which Trump falsely called the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine “quite lethal.” He further claimed that vaccine doses for infants are “like the size of a soda bottle,” and called for the MMR vaccine to be split into three separate immunizations, despite no evidence of benefit from such a split and no such individual immunizations being available in the US.

Read full article

Comments