An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The number of victims paying ransomware threat actors has reached a new low, with just 23% of the breached companies giving in to attackers’ demands. With some exceptions, the decline in payment resolution rates continues the trend that Coveware has observed for the past six years. In the first quarter of 2024, the payment percentage was 28%. Although it increased over the next period, it continued to drop, reaching an all-time low in the third quarter of 2025.

One explanation for this is that organizations implemented stronger and more targeted protections against ransomware, and authorities increasing pressure for victims not to pay the hackers. […] Over the years, ransomware groups moved from pure encryption attacks to double extortion that came with data theft and the threat of a public leak. Coveware reports that more than 76% of the attacks it observed in Q3 2025 involved data exfiltration, which is now the primary objective for most ransomware groups. The company says that when it isolates the attacks that do not encrypt the data and only steal it, the payment rate plummets to 19%, which is also a record for that sub-category.

The average and median ransomware payments fell in Q3 compared to the previous quarter, reaching $377,000 and $140,000, respectively, according to Coveware. The shift may reflect large enterprises revising their ransom payment policies and recognizing that those funds are better spent on strengthening defenses against future attacks. The researchers also note that threat groups like Akira and Qilin, which accounted for 44% of all recorded attacks in Q3 2025, have switched focus to medium-sized firms that are currently more likely to pay a ransom. “Cyber defenders, law enforcement, and legal specialists should view this as validation of collective progress,” Coveware says. “The work that gets put in to prevent attacks, minimize the impact of attacks, and successfully navigate a cyber extortion — each avoided payment constricts cyber attackers of oxygen.”

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Apple is preparing to roll out a new Apple Wallet feature that lets U.S. users create digital IDs linked to their passports, usable at select TSA checkpoints. TechCrunch reports: The feature, previously announced as part of the iOS 26 release, comes on the heels of Apple’s expansion of Wallet as more than a payment mechanism or ticket holder, but also a secure place to store a user’s digital identity. Currently, support for government IDs in Apple Wallet has rolled out to 12 states and Puerto Rico, or roughly a third of U.S. license holders. However, the passport-tied Digital ID feature didn’t arrive with the debut of iOS 26, as Apple said it would come in a future software update. […]

The coming launch of passport-associated Digital IDs was announced on Sunday by Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, at the Money 20/20 USA conference, where the exec also shared other stats about Wallet’s adoption.

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Grokipedia, the encyclopedia powered by xAI’s assistant Grok briefly went online Monday, before it promptly crashed. At the time of this writing, the website appears to be working, and contains more than 885,000 articles, according to a counter on its homepage.   

Musk, who has previously railed against Wikipedia, has described the project as a “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.” Musk and his allies have long claimed that Wikipedia is biased. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has called Musk’s claims about the crowd-sourced encyclopedia “factually incorrect.” 

Musk said last week that Grokipedia’s launch had been delayed in order “to do more work to purge out the propaganda.” Notably, some articles are nearly identical to their entries in Wikipedia, though Grokipedia doesn’t contain in-line links to sources in the same format. Such entries do have a small disclaimer that “the content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”

In other cases, social media users have already spotted instances where Musk’s worldview is more obvious in the “AI-powered encyclopedia.” Here’s an excerpt from the entry for “university,” as captured by Bluesky user Jeremy Cohen. 

Bluesky

And here’s a screenshot of Grokipedia’s entry for Musk, which was captured by Bleusky user Miles Lee. 

Bluesky

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/xs-grokipedia-is-online-after-it-briefly-crashed-out-231108836.html?src=rss

Turbochargers have been injecting more power into engines for over 100 years, but never before have they been so prevalent in our cars. A little boost can add a lot of power and efficiency, too, making a turbocharger a great solution to eke maximum performance out of today’s engines. Usually, though, that comes with the penalty of throttle lag: You put your foot to the floor, and nothing much happens for a beat or two.

As we’ve recently seen in our review of the new 911 GTS, Porsche’s engineers have worked some magic to create a turbocharger that provides all the power and fun of forced induction but with none of the throttle response penalty. If adding one high-tech, high-voltage turbocharger is good, surely two would be better, right? Indeed, it is, if you can afford the cost of entry. Meet the 701 hp (523 kW) 2026 911 Turbo S, Porsche’s new most powerful 911 ever.

Twinning the T-Hybrid

For Porsche’s first hybrid 911, the GTS, the company didn’t simply add an electric motor and bigger battery into the mix and call it a day. It also inserted another high-speed motor into the turbocharger, enabling it to spin up to maximum speed in less than a second, nearly eliminating turbo lag.

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Qualcomm has entered the AI data center chip race with its new AI200 and AI250 accelerators, directly challenging Nvidia and AMD’s dominance by promising lower power costs and high memory capacity. CNBC reports: The AI chips are a shift from Qualcomm, which has thus far focused on semiconductors for wireless connectivity and mobile devices, not massive data centers. Qualcomm said that both the AI200, which will go on sale in 2026, and the AI250, planned for 2027, can come in a system that fills up a full, liquid-cooled server rack. Qualcomm is matching Nvidia and AMD, which offer their graphics processing units, or GPUs, in full-rack systems that allow as many as 72 chips to act as one computer. AI labs need that computing power to run the most advanced models.

Qualcomm’s data center chips are based on the AI parts in Qualcomm’s smartphone chips called Hexagon neural processing units, or NPUs. “We first wanted to prove ourselves in other domains, and once we built our strength over there, it was pretty easy for us to go up a notch into the data center level,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s general manager for data center and edge, said on a call with reporters last week.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As you’re hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. In the corner of the video, a smiling real estate agent narrates the walk-through of your dream home in a soothing tone. It looks perfect — maybe a little too perfect. The catch? Everything in the video isAI-generated. The real property is completely empty, and the luxury furniture is a product of virtual staging. The realtor’s voice-over and expressions were born from text prompts. Even the camera’s slow pan over each room is orchestrated by AI, because there was no actual video camera involved.

Any real estate agent can create “exactly that, at home, in minutes,” says Alok Gupta, a former product manager at Facebook and software engineer at Snapchat who cofounded AutoReel, an app that allows realtors to turn images from their property listings into videos. He said that between 500 and 1,000 new listing videos are being created with AutoReel every day, with realtors across the US and even in New Zealand and India using the technology to market thousands of properties. This is one of many AI tools, including more familiar ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, that are quickly reshaping the real estate industry into something that isn’t necessarily, well, real. “People that want to buy a house, they’re going to make the largest investment of their lifetime,” said Nathan Cool, a real estate photographer who runs an educational YouTube channel. “They don’t want to be fooled before they ever arrive.”

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An anonymous reader shares a column: As the AI boom develops, consultants are in a tricky spot. The pandemic, inflation and economic uncertainty have encouraged many of their big clients to tighten expenditure. The U.S. government, one of the biggest spenders, has been cancelling multiple billion-dollar contracts in an effort to conserve cash. In March, 10 of the largest consultants including Deloitte, Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM and Guidehouse were targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency to justify their fees. As a result, the largest listed players’ shares have collapsed by up to 30% in the past two years, against the S&P 500’s 50% jump.

AI is, in some respects, a boon. In September, Accenture said it had helped it cut 11,000 jobs, and CEO Julie Sweet is set to augment that with staff that cannot be retrained. Salesforce recently laid off 4000 customer support workers. Microsoft has halted hiring in its consulting business. Unfortunately, big clients are cottoning on to the advantages too. One finance chief of a large UK company outlined the issue for Breakingviews via an illustrative example. Say an outsourced project costs the client $1 million to do themselves, and Accenture and the like have historically been able to do the same job for $200,000. With the advent of machine learning, companies can do the same work for just $10,000. This gives clients considerable leverage. If consultants won’t lower their prices to near the relevant level, the client can find one who will. Or just do the job itself.

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This brand-new Microsoft Surface Pro 7 offers portability, flexibility, and power that still holds up for most people who want a dependable Windows machine without overpaying, and it’s on sale for $659.99 at StackSocial right now. The 12.3-inch PixelSense touchscreen remains sharp and responsive, with a 2736×1824 resolution that makes documents, spreadsheets, and streaming look crisp. It’s lightweight at 1.7 pounds, and the built-in kickstand turns it from tablet to laptop on demand—something the Surface line has always nailed.

The Surface Pro 7 is powered by a 10th Gen Intel Core i5 processor, paired with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. That combination is no longer cutting-edge, but it’s still sufficient for everyday tasks like writing, browsing, video calls, and light creative projects. The battery is rated for up to 10.5 hours, which means you’ll likely get through a workday before needing to recharge. You also get a mix of ports that newer devices sometimes skip: both USB-A and USB-C, a headphone jack, and even a microSDXC card reader for quick storage expansion. Wifi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 ensure modern connections, and for those invested in the Surface ecosystem, it still works with accessories like the Type Cover keyboard and Surface Pen, though they’re sold separately.

This model won’t compete with the latest Surface Pro 11 or high-end ultrabooks if you’re looking for raw speed, and the cameras top out at 1080p video when many laptops now ship with 1080p or even 4K webcams. It also doesn’t come with a warranty, so the price reflects a final-sale deal. Still, for someone who needs a 2-in-1 that balances tablet portability with laptop functionality, the Surface Pro 7 remains a solid choice. It’s a way to get a brand-new Microsoft device with decent specs at a reasonable cost, if you’re willing to accept that it’s no longer the newest kid on the block.

Employees are using AI to generate fake expense receipts. Leading expense software platforms report a sharp increase in AI-created fraudulent documents following the launch of improved image generation models by OpenAI and Google. AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for 14% of fraudulent documents submitted in September compared with none last year. Ramp flagged more than one million dollars in fraudulent invoices within 90 days. About 30% of financial professionals in the US and UK surveyed by Medius reported seeing a rise in falsified receipts after OpenAI released GPT-4o last year.

SAP Concur processes more than 80 million compliance checks monthly and now warns customers to not trust their eyes. The receipts include wrinkles in paper, detailed itemization matching real menus and signatures. Creating fraudulent documents previously required photo editing skills or paying for such services. Free and accessible image generation software has made it possible for anyone to falsify receipts in seconds by writing simple text instructions to chatbots.

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