Vodafone made a commercial starring an AI avatar posing as a real lady. This is interesting because Vodafone is a major global brand and not a fly-by-night TikTok company using a ridiculous deepfake of Jackson Galaxy to sell cat toys.
The tells in the commercial are obvious and what one would expect. The AI avatar’s hair is a bit off, which ruins the charade that this is a real person. The physical mannerisms and speaking tone are also wonky. A facial mole moves around at one point. It’s AI. You know the drill.
The company responded to a question on a message board as to why it couldn’t put “a real person in front of the camera” by saying this is simply an experiment. It said it was “testing different styles of advertising — this time with AI,” and that “AI is so much a part of everyday life these days that we also try it out in advertising.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/vodafone-is-testing-an-ai-actor-to-sell-its-products-instead-of-paying-a-human-to-do-it-185301360.html?src=rss
Intel is looking to leverage its chip manufacturing foundry business as a core part of its plan to right the ship, as the company attempts to secure orders from third parties. Though comments from Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon won’t help matters. Amon claimed in a recent interview that Intel still has work to do when it comes to optimizing its
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday authorizing the Department of Defense to refer to itself as the Department of War, reverting to a more bellicose title used until a 1940s-era military shakeup in the aftermath of World War II.
The order approves the Pentagon’s use of the Department of War name as an “additional secondary title” for the Department of Defense while the Trump administration seeks congressional approval to officially change the name. Until Congress votes on the issue, the name change is effectively a rebrand of the DoD that could be reversed with the signature of a future president.
But there was another potential name change revealed by the Pentagon on Friday, just hours before Trump signed the War Department order. This one may have more staying power.
Signal has begun rolling out end-to-end encrypted cloud backups in its latest Android beta release. The opt-in feature allows users to restore message history if their phone is lost or damaged. Free backups include all text messages and 45 days of media attachments. A $1.99 monthly subscription extends media storage to 100GB.
Users generate a 64-character recovery key on their device that Signal’s servers never access. Backups refresh daily, excluding view-once messages and those set to disappear within 24 hours. The nonprofit cited storage costs as the reason for its first paid tier. iOS and Desktop support will follow the Android rollout. Signal said it stores backup archives without linking them to specific user accounts or payment information.
SpaceX’s complaints to the Federal Communications Commission have helped the satellite company land a $17 billion deal to buy spectrum licenses from EchoStar.
The deal consists of up to $8.5 billion in cash and up to $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock, EchoStar said. SpaceX also agreed to pay $2 billion worth of interest payments on EchoStar debt through November 2027.
After SpaceX alleged that EchoStar subsidiary Dish Network “barely uses” its spectrum and urged the FCC to make the spectrum available to other carriers, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced an investigation into EchoStar and threatened to revoke its spectrum licenses. EchoStar countered that it had met the network construction deadlines associated with its spectrum licenses, but decided to start selling off the licenses instead of fighting the FCC.
Bad actors are also abusing Calendar invites to send phishing emails that look like PayPal purchase notifications—and because the messages come from Apple’s mail server, they can slip past security measures and find their way into your inbox.
Scammers are using Calendar to send callback phishing emails
This latest scam, detailed by BleepingComputer, is a form of callback phishing, which aims to get targets on the phone in order to collect sensitive information or connect to users’ devices.
The scheme begins with a calendar invite to an event titled “Purchase Invoice.” The notes for the event state that the recipient’s PayPal account has been billed for a large sum of money and directs the user to call a support number to discuss, make changes to, or cancel the payment. The hope is that you will be scared into believing your PayPal account has been compromised. If you call, the scammer on the other end will likely try to extract sensitive information or direct you to download and install malware to your device under the guise of issuing a refund.
On closer inspection, you’ll find that the message originated from noreply@email.apple.com, a legitimate Apple mail server, which allowed it to get through security checks and spam filters. As BleepingComputer describes, anyone can create an iCloud Calendar event and add others to initiate email invitations from Apple’s servers.
In this case, scammers also appear to be using a Microsoft 365 email address that is actually a mailing list, which forwards messages to recipients added to the group—the targets for this scam. Threat actors used a similar tactic earlier this year to send emails that appeared to be from service@paypal.com.
How to combat fake calendar invites
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to prevent fraudulent iCloud Calendar invites from ever reaching your inbox, and declining them may actually make the problem worse. You can transfer spam events to a separate calendar and delete calendars entirely, but when it comes to the notification emails and any directions listed within, the best thing to do is not engage.
Always proceed with an abundance of caution with calendar invites you weren’t expecting, and watch out for scam hallmarks like a sense of urgency related to payment or account security issues. Never call phone numbers listed in these messages—if you’re concerned about your account, log in via the legitimate website or app to check activity and reach out to the company using contact information found there.
Google has stated in a court filing that “the open web is already in rapid decline,” contradicting recent public statements from executives including its CEO Sundar Pichai and Search VP Nick Fox, who maintained in May that web publishing and the web were thriving.
The admission appeared in Google’s response to a divestiture proposal, arguing that breaking up the company would accelerate the decline and harm publishers dependent on open-web display advertising revenue. Google’s VP of Global Ads Dan Taylor has since clarified the company was referring specifically to open-web display advertising, not the entire open web.
PC enthusiasts around the Internet were buzzing recently, when @I_Leak_VN posted reports of a bespoke GeForce RTX 5090 featuring a whopping 128GB of prototype GDDR7X VRAM, to reportedly be sold for a wallet-busting $13,200 USD. Compared to a stock GeFoce RTX 5090’s hefty allocation of 32GB GDDR7 VRAM, that’s an exorbitant number— four times
Today, Polestar debuted its newest model. Just as threeis followed by four, next in the series comes five—in this case the Polestar 5. And the new EV is a little departure from the products we’ve seen so far from this Swedish/Chinese startup. It’s a handsome if angular sedan that, like the Polestar 4 SUV, eschews a rear window in favor of more headroom for passengers and a rear-view camera.
“Polestar 5 is bringing the future to our present. Our vision for Polestar’s design, technology, and sustainability direction is no longer a dream but a reality our customers can buy,” said Polestar CEO Michael Lohscheller. “With its pure Scandinavian design inside and out, unique platform, powerful motors, sophisticated chassis, cutting-edge technology, and consciously sustainable materials, the Polestar 5 is a guiding star for the industry and the perfect Polestar flagship.”
As we found out when we met the car early during its development, the Polestar 5 uses a bonded aluminum chassis, similar to various Lotuses and most current Aston Martins. Indeed, plenty of the development engineers working at Polestar’s UK R&D center in Coventry can count those brands on their CVs. The bonded aluminum approach results in a very stiff but quite light chassis, making it a good starting point for a performance car.
In the Fall 2025 “This Season on Zwift” press release, Zwift revealed several upcoming changes to the Zwift Racing Score system which is used to group riders for most of the races on the platform. These changes will have a significant impact on rider scores, so let’s dive into the details…
Zwift Racing Score Decay
Launching mid-September
Zwift Racing Score decay was built into the early system, but the feature was turned off in October 2024 because feedback from Zwifters indicated it wasn’t making scoring more accurate. At that time, Zwift said, “We may turn this back on later after making some improvements to the mechanism.”
Zwift has now made those improvements, and they are reintroducing decay into the ZRS system. Zwift says, “This means that if you stop racing for a while, your displayed score will very gradually drift downward (after 30 days without a race), and the system’s uncertainty about your true level goes up – so when you return, you’re matched more fairly rather than a stale high score.”
Digging a little deeper, this change involves:
30‑day grace period: Your score will only begin decaying after 30 days without a scored race.
Rising Uncertainty, Fairer Returns: After the 30-day grace period, the system’s uncertainty for your score will also increase, allowing your score to adjust more rapidly once you do race again. Or to put it another way: returning racers will adjust faster to their real level.
Decay is Capped (or better, Floored): Your score will not drift infinitely downward.
Discourages Rating Squatting: Built-in decay means riders can’t climb to a higher score and stay there without racing. It keeps rankings fresh.
In practical terms, Zwift says this is what you can expect if you take a break from racing:
Short break (within grace period): No change; you won’t feel penalized for a holiday or training block.
Moderate break: Slight downward adjustment; you may see a modest score dip that encourages re-engagement.
Long break: You settle at a conservative plateau; when you come back, early results will move you faster than before.
Rewarding Personal Bests with Instant Score Updates
Launching mid-September
ZRS is a results-based algorithm where your score changes based on your finishing position in races. But the foundational component of the ZRS algorithm is your seed score, which is based on your 90-day power personal bests.
One crucial thing your seed score provides is a ZRS floor value – the lowest your score can drop to. Your ZRS floor is 15% below your seed score.
Currently, if you set a new power PB (in a free ride, workout, race, or any Zwift activity), your ZRS is only immediately changed if the updated floor value based on your new power PB is higher than your current ZRS. This means there are plenty of scenarios where riders will hit new power PBs outside of a race, but their scores don’t change. Here’s one example of how that could work…
Example 1 (current system):
Current ZRS: 500
New Seed Score Based on New Power PB: 540
New Floor Value (85% of Seed Score): 459
New ZRS: 500 (unchanged, because it is higher than the new floor value)
With the new system, when a rider achieves a 90-day power PB, their racing score will immediately be set to the new, higher “seed” value if that seed value is higher than their current ZRS.
Example 2 (new system):
Current ZRS: 500
New Seed Score Based on New Power PB: 540
New ZRS: 540 (score instantly set to new seed score, since it was higher than the rider’s current score)
In simple terms, this change will lead to ZRS increases for more riders, which should mean more riders’ scores will accurately affect their current peak fitness. To be specific:
Active Racers will see score boosts immediately when their power PB wasn’t in a race
Active Non-Racers who are training but not racing will get their score adjusted upwards with new PB values, helping ensure their score is accurate once they race
Returning Users coming back to Zwift after a break will have their scores adjusted more quickly as they set power PBs in any Zwift activity
30-Day Best Score for Race Categorization
Launching late September/early October
Soon, race organizers will have the option of categorizing riders based on 30-day best ZRS, as opposed to the current ZRS that all scored races use.
Why the change? Some racers have complained that riders are purposely tanking their score by riding hard enough to bypass Zwift’s anti-tanking measures while still finishing far down in the results. This is especially prevalent among racers who naturally sit near the cutoff lines for categories.
These racers may enter a “target” race with a score that places them near the top of their category, winning the race and receiving a ZRS result that would push them out of their category and into the next highest.
They will then purposely tank a race or two (or perhaps four, via our Tiny Races), dropping their ZRS so they can once again enter the lower category in their target race.
With this change, race organizers may enable “30-Day Max Score Enforcement” for their event, meaning even if a racer purposely tanked their score across multiple events, they would still be categorized based on their highest score in the past 30 days.
Simply put, this is an additional anti-tanking measure. And I think it’s a good one that many race organizers will use.
(For our Tiny Races in particular, this feature will have the added benefit of reducing how often a rider starts the set of four Tinies in one category, then gets forced into a higher category mid-set, eliminating their chance of a high overall placing since they raced in two different categories on the day.)
Displaying Score Deltas in Results
Launching mid-September
We published a post about the ZwiftPower ZRS browser plugin just 2 weeks ago. This fun little community-created add-on for ZwiftPower adds ZRS results to ZwiftPower pages, including a delta figure showing how much each rider’s ZRS changed in that race.
In that post, I asked Zwift to add the delta figure to race results found on event pages at zwift.com. Little did I know, Zwift already had that change in the works (which explains why the delta figure was available in the API data for the ZwiftPower ZRS plugin to access in the first place).
Anyway – this is a small change, but a welcome one. The deltas will also be visible in results on Zwift Companion.
Questions or Comments
That’s a pretty significant list of changes impacting Zwift Racing Score. What do you think of the changes? Share your thoughts below!
CloudRift.AI posted a $1000 bug bounty on their blog a couple of days ago, asking the Internet at large for help with an NVIDIA reset bug impacting the RTX 5090 and RTX Pro 6000 Series GPUs. Then, prominent AI venture TinyCorp signal boosted this bug bounty on Twitter, magnifying this story in eyes of the general public. This also resulted
The Aikido blog describes
an apparently ongoing series of phishing attacks against NPM package
maintainers, resulting in the uploading of compromised versions of heavily
used packages:
All together, these packages have more than 2 billion downloads per
week.
The packages were updated to contain a piece of code that would be
executed on the client of a website, which silently intercepts
crypto and web3 activity in the browser, manipulates wallet
interactions, and rewrites payment destinations so that funds and
approvals are redirected to attacker-controlled accounts without
any obvious signs to the user.
Amazon Music has just launched new AI-powered weekly playlists based on the “preferences and mood” of listeners. This just means it scrapes what you’ve already been listening to and extrapolates further. It doesn’t apply modern technology to gauge the actual mood of users.
The company says the playlists include “a curated mix of familiar favorites from their most listened-to artists and latest favorites to new discoveries.” I’m not exactly sure how this is different from what music streaming platforms have always done to create personalized playlists, other than these are made using Amazon’s Bedrock generative AI platform.
Amazon
They do arrive with snappy names to suggest the type of songs included, like “Empowerment Anthems” and “Melodic Flex.” This seems similar to Spotify’s Daylists, which also use cute little names. The Amazon playlists can be saved to the library or shared with friends via text or social media.
“The feature represents another way we’re harnessing AI to help fans connect with more music that resonates with them,” said Ryan Redington, General Manager of Amazon Music. He also said this brings a “new dimension” to the service by “creating personalized playlists celebrating their favorite artists while introducing new music that matches their unique tastes.” Again, personalized playlists are nothing new.
Download the latest update to the app to get started. These weekly playlists are currently only available to US listeners and drop on Mondays.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/amazon-music-launches-ai-powered-weekly-playlists-based-on-preferences-and-mood-174239246.html?src=rss
Private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) might just turn out to be Rian Johnson’s greatest creation. Introduced in 2019’s Knives Out, Blanc’s syrupy Southern drawl and idiosyncratic approach to solving a mysterious New England death charmed audiences worldwide and launched a modern whodunnit franchise.
The third installment in the series, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, has already garnered early rave reviews after screening at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) over the weekend. And now Netflix has released the official trailer, showcasing Blanc tackling the inexplicable death of a parish priest in a spookily Gothic small-town setting.
(Very minor spoilers for Knives Out and Glass Onion below.)
Samsung’s FE series stands for “Fan Edition,” and it’s the budget version of its devices, similar to Pixel’s A-series. The design is sleek and stays on brand compared to previous models. You can pinch and swipe the earbuds to control media. You can take them on a run outside without worrying about sweat and some rain since it’s rated IP54 (water and dust resistance).
In the audio department, it’s nice to see Samsung not skimp out just because they’re “budget” earbuds, offering support for 24-bit audio that lets you play hi-fi sound. It also features ANC, which Samsung claims to have improved upon compared to the previous generation. Something new is Samsung’s Crystal Clear Call, which uses AI to help isolate your voice when you’re on a call. The mics are now also facing your mouth so it should result in better overall call quality.
If you have a Pixel, Samsung, or compatible phone, you’ll be able to take advantage of the Gemini or the Galaxy AI support, which can do real-time translation, where someone speaks to you in another language and you hear the translation on your earbuds in real time. You also get auto-switching and can track your earbuds, among other features. The battery is great, at eight hours with ANC off (six hours with ANC on), the highest run time in the Galaxy Buds series.
A 67-year-old US man is still alive more than six months after receiving a kidney from a genetically modified pig. This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person. From a report: Researchers say the outcome is a landmark case of successful xenotransplantation — the process of transplanting organs from animals to humans. The recipient, Tim Andrews, had end-stage kidney disease and had been receiving dialysis for more than two years before he underwent the surgery in January. He has been dialysis-free since receiving the kidney. Andrews was one of three patients to receive genetically modified pig kidneys supplied by the biotechnology company eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on compassionate grounds.
Reaching six months’ survival is an amazing feat, says Wayne Hawthorne, a transplant surgeon at the University of Sydney in Australia. The first six months is the period of “highest risk for the patient and also the transplant,” he adds. Possible complications include anaemia and graft rejection, when the immune system attacks the new organ. “The six-month time point marks that things have gone extremely well,” Hawthorne says. Reaching 12 months would be another milestone and a “fantastic long-term outcome,” he adds. Previously, the recipient with longest-surviving genetically modified pig organ was a 53-year-old US woman, Towana Looney, who had a functioning pig kidney for four months and nine days. However, the organ was removed earlier this year because her immune system began to reject it.
In five years, you won’t be able to spell IT without AI, Gartner predicted today.
VP analysts Alicia Mullery and Daryl Plummer delivered the sentiment at their keynote address at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Gold Coast, Australia, as reported by The Register. Gartner believes that by 2030, all work performed by an IT department will involve the use of AI. That’s a progression from the 81 percent of IT work that’s done today without any use of AI, per Mullery.
By 2030, not only will all IT work rely on AI, but much of it will be performed by bots without the help of humans, Gartner’s analysts said. They predicted that in five years, 25 percent of IT work will be totally performed by bots, while 75 percent of IT workloads will be performed by humans with the help of AI.
About a year ago, an AI startup known as Recogni announced a patented number system for AI math, known as Pareto. Pareto is a logarithmic system, meaning that it stores numbers using their logarithmic representation rather than their absolute values. This can be highly advantageous for AI, because it drastically simplifies the math you need
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