Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told The Verge today that the company plans to transform Edge into an "agentic browser" where Copilot controls tabs, navigates websites and completes tasks while users watch. Unlike The Browser Company's new Dia browser, Microsoft will integrate these capabilities directly into Edge.

Suleyman described Copilot opening tabs, reading multiple pages simultaneously and performing research transparently in real-time. The AI visits websites directly, preserving publisher traffic. Current Copilot features include tab navigation, page scrolling and content highlighting. Users will have the option to disable AI features entirely. Suleyman predicted that within years, AI companions will handle most browsing tasks while users provide oversight and feedback.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, the AI video company Runway joined forces with the major Hollywood studio Lionsgate in a partnership the pair hoped would result in AI-generated scenes and even potentially full-length movies. But the project has hit a snag. According to a report by The Wrap, the past 12 months have been unproductive. Lionsgate distributes Hollywood blockbusters including The Hunger Games, John Wick, The Twilight Saga, and Saw franchises. But despite its huge catalog, it is simply not enough for the AI to produce quality content.

"The Lionsgate catalog is too small to create a model," a source tells The Wrap. "In fact, the Disney catalog is too small to create a model." Despite Runway being one of the leading names in AI video, the technology needs a copious amount of data to produce AI-generated films. It is the reason AI has proven to be such an unpopular technology, as AI firms help themselves to any type of media they can get their hands on -- whether it has copyright protections or not. Another issue is the rights of actors and the model for remuneration if their likeness appears in an AI-generated clip. It is a legal gray area with no clear path.

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CNBC: Instagram now has 3 billion monthly active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday on his Instagram account. "What an incredible community we've built here," Zuckerberg posted on his Instagram channel.

The figure is a major milestone for the photo-sharing app, which the social media company acquired in 2012 for $1 billion. Meta last disclosed Instagram's user figures in October 2022 when Zuckerberg said during an earnings call that the app had crossed 2 billion monthly users.

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Private equity firms are facing systemic challenges after a half-century of meteoric growth as attractive takeover targets become scarce and financing costs remain elevated while exits prove increasingly difficult. US buyout funds currently hold more than 12,000 companies that would take approximately nine years to fully distribute at current rates, according to PitchBook data.

The industry holds $1.2 trillion in dry powder and nearly a quarter of that capital was pledged at least four years ago. More than 18,000 private capital funds seek $3.3 trillion from increasingly reluctant investors, Bain estimates. Quarterly returns for US private equity funds fell from 13.5% in Q2 2021 to 0.8% in Q4 2024. Apollo President Jim Zelter described the situation as a "natural washout" at an investor conference this month. Charles Wilson of Selby Jennings added that "many PE firms are dead already, they just don't know it" and noted survival depends on how forgiving limited partners -- the entities, including pension funds and endowments, that have invested in private equity firms -- prove when firms return for new fundraising.

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Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told attendees at yesterday's Snapdragon Summit opening keynote that he has seen Google's merged Android-ChromeOS platform for PCs. Speaking alongside Google's head of platforms and devices Rick Osterloh, Amon said the software "delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC" and that he "can't wait to have one."

Osterloh confirmed Google is building a common technical foundation for PCs and desktop computing systems that combines Android and ChromeOS. The platform will include Gemini, the full Android AI stack, all Google applications and the Android developer community. "I've seen it, it is incredible," replied Amon excitedly. "It delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC. I can't wait to have one."

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Australian horror film Together, starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, underwent digital alterations for its mainland China release on September 12. Chinese cinemagoers discovered that a wedding scene between two men had been modified using face-swapping technology to transform one male character into a female appearance. The change only became apparent after side-by-side screenshots from the original and altered versions circulated on social media platforms.

Chinese viewers are expressing outrage over the AI-powered modification, The Guardian reports, citing concerns about creative integrity and the difficulty of detecting such alterations compared to traditional scene cuts. The film's distributor halted the scheduled September 19 general release following the backlash. China's censorship authorities require all imported films to undergo approval before release.

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Pocket Casts is being flogged for showing advertisements to legacy users who were promised an ad-free experience. From a report: The first reports started to appear in early September in the Pocket Casts support forum and subreddit. The issue is a bug, according to Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Pocket Casts' parent company Automattic, and will be corrected. Pocket Casts launched as a purchase-only app in 2010, charging users a one-time download fee of up to $10, depending on the OS and platform. The service later switched to a subscription-based model and made the app available for free in 2019. After backlash from users, the company gave anyone who paid for the web or desktop apps before the pricing changes free lifetime access to Pocket Casts Plus, its ad-free premium subscription service.

The app was acquired by Automattic in 2021, and the Pocket Casts Lifetime memberships were rebranded to "Pocket Casts Champion" in August 2024.

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Microsoft on Sept 24 announced new options for US and European customers to safely extend the life of the Windows 10 operating system free of charge just days before a key deadline to upgrade to Windows 11. From a report: The US tech giant plans to end support for Windows 10 on Oct 14, a move that has drawn criticism from consumer advocacy groups and sparked concerns among users who fear they will need to purchase new computers to stay protected from cyber threats.

Users who are unable to upgrade or choose to forgo the extended security updates will face increased vulnerability to cyberattacks. In response to these concerns, Microsoft informed European users that essential security updates will be extended for one year at no additional cost, provided they log in with a Microsoft account. Previously, the company had offered a one-year extension of Windows 10 security updates for $30 to users whose hardware is incompatible with Windows 11. In the US, a similar free option will allow users to upload their Windows 10 profiles to Microsoft's backup service and receive security updates for up to one year.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: After deflecting the US Department of Justice's attack on its illegal monopoly in online search, Google is facing another attempt to dismantle its internet empire in a trial focused on abusive tactics in digital advertising. The trial that opened Monday in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal court revolves around the harmful conduct that resulted in US district Judge Leonie Brinkema declaring parts of Google's digital advertising technology to be an illegal monopoly in April. The judge found that Google has been engaging in behavior that stifles competition to the detriment of online publishers that depend on the system for revenue.

Google and the justice department will spend the next two weeks in court presenting evidence in a "remedy" trial that will culminate in Brinkema issuing a ruling on how to restore fair market conditions. If the justice department gets its way, Brinkema will order Google to sell parts of its ad technology -- a proposal that the company's lawyers warned would "invite disruption and damage" to consumers and the internet's ecosystem. The justice department contends a breakup would be the most effective and quickest way to undercut a monopoly that has been stifling competition and innovation for years. [...]

The case, filed in 2023 under Joe Biden's administration, threatens the complex network that Google has spent the past 17 years building to power its dominant digital advertising business. Digital advertising sales account for most of the $305 billion in revenue that Google's services division generates for its corporate parent Alphabet. The company's sprawling network of display ads provide the lifeblood that keeps thousands of websites alive. Google believes it has already made enough changes to its "ad manager" system, including providing more options and pricing options, to resolve the problems Brinkema flagged in her monopoly ruling.

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Cloudflare has unveiled the Content Signals Policy, a free addition to its managed robots.txt service that aims to give website owners and publishers more control over how their content is accessed and reused by AI companies. The idea is pretty simple: robots.txt already lets site operators specify which crawlers can enter and where. Cloudflare's new policy adds a layer that signals how the data may be used once accessed, with plain-language terms for search, AI input, and AI training. "Yes" means allowed, "no" means not allowed, and no signal means no preference.

Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO, said: "The Internet cannot wait for a solution, while in the meantime, creators' original content is used for profit by other companies. To ensure the web remains open and thriving, we're giving website owners a better way to express how companies are allowed to use their content." Cloudflare says more than 3.8 million domains already use its robots.txt tools to signal they don't want their content used for AI training. Now, the Content Signals Policy makes those preferences clearer and potentially enforceable. Further reading: Cloudflare Flips AI Scraping Model With Pay-Per-Crawl System For Publishers

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Fossil fuel burning is not just damaging the world's climate; it is also threatening the health of at least 1.6 billion people through the toxic pollutants it produces, data shows. From a report: Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from fossil fuel burning, does not directly damage health, but leads to global heating. However, coal and oil burning for power generation, and the burning of fossil fuels in industrial facilities, pollute the air with particulate matter called PM2.5, which has serious health impacts when breathed in.

A new interactive map from Climate Trace, a coalition of academics and analysts that tracks pollution and greenhouse gases, shows that PM2.5 and other toxins are being poured into the air near the homes of about 1.6 billion people. Of these, about 900 million are in the path of "super-emitting" industrial facilities -- including power plants, refineries, ports and mines -- that deliver outsize doses of toxic air.

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The pressure is mounting on business leaders to harness AI to make work faster, cheaper, and more efficient. That may thrill investors, but for employees, it could mean fewer jobs around the world. From a report: At the $320 billion software giant SAP, there will likely be a need for fewer engineers to deliver the same -- or even greater -- output, according to the company's CFO Dominik Asam.

"There's more automation, simply," Asam told Business Insider. "There are certain tasks which are automated and for the same volume of output we can afford to have less people." As a C-suite exec at Europe's most valuable software company, Asam cautioned that this reality will only come true if the corporate world implements the technology properly. After all, a recent MIT study found that 95% of generative AI pilots have not met the mark. "I will be brutal. And I also say this internally. For SAP and any other software company, AI is a great catalyst. It can be either great or catastrophe," Asam warned. "It will be great if you do it well, if you are able to implement it and do it faster than others. If you are left behind, you will have a problem for sure. We work day and night to not fall behind."

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Cloudflare blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack against a European network infrastructure company, which peaked at 22.2 Tbps and 10.6 Bpps. The hyper-volumetric attack has been linked to the Aisuru botnet and lasted just 40 seconds, but was double the size of the previous record. SecurityWeek reports: Cloudflare told SecurityWeek that the attack was aimed at a single IP address of an unnamed European network infrastructure company. Cloudflare has yet to determine who was behind the attack, but believes it may have been powered by the Aisuru botnet, which was also linked earlier this year to a massive 6.3 Tbps attack on the website of cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. Aisuru has been around for more than a year. The botnet is powered by hacked IoT devices such as routers and DVRs that have been compromised through the exploitation of known and zero-day vulnerabilities.

According to Cloudflare, the 22 Tbps attack was traced to over 404,000 unique source IPs across over 14 ASNs worldwide. "Based on internal analysis using a proprietary system, the source IPs were not spoofed," the company explained. The security firm described it as a UDP carpet bomb attack targeting an average of 31,000 destination ports per second, with a peak of 47k ports, all of a single IP address. Cloudflare revealed in July that the number of DDoS attacks it blocked in the first half of 2025 had already exceeded all the attacks mitigated in 2024.

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In a bid to slash red tape, the European Commission wants to eliminate one of its peskiest laws: a 2009 tech rule that plastered the online world with pop-ups requesting consent to cookies. From a report: It's the kind of simplification ordinary Europeans can get behind. European rulemakers in 2009 revised a law called the e-Privacy Directive to require websites to get consent from users before loading cookies on their devices, unless the cookies are "strictly necessary" to provide a service. Fast forward to 2025 and the internet is full of consent banners that users have long learned to click away without thinking twice.

"Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it's no longer perceived in the same way by users," said Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman. Cookie technology is now a focal point of the EU executive's plans to simplify technology regulation. Officials want to present an "omnibus" text in December, scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies. On Monday, it held a meeting with the tech industry to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When the COVID-19 pandemic forced kids to stay home, educators flocked to VMware, and thousands of school districts adopted virtualization. The technology became a solution for distance learning during the pandemic and after, when events such as bad weather and illness can prevent children from physically attending school. However, the VMware being sold to K-12 schools today differs from the VMware that existed before and during the pandemic. Now a Broadcom business, the platform features higher prices and a business strategy that favors big spenders. This has created unique problems for educational IT departments juggling restrictive budgets and multiple technology vendors with children's needs.

Ars Technica recently spoke with an IT director at a public school district in Indiana. The director requested anonymity for themself and the district out of concern about potential blowback. The director confirmed that the district has five schools and about 3,000 students. The district started using VMware's vSAN, a software-defined storage offering, and the vSphere virtualization platform in 2019. The Indiana school system bought the VMware offerings through a package that combined them with VxRail, which is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware that Dell jointly engineered with VMware.

However, like many of VMware customers, the Indiana school district was priced out of VMware after Broadcom's acquisition of the company. The IT director said the district received a quote that was "three to six" times higher than expected. This came as the school district is looking to manage changes in education-related taxes and funding over the next few years. As a result, the district's migration from VMware is taking IT resources from other projects, including ones aimed at improving curriculum. For instance, the Indiana district has been trying to bolster its technology curriculum, the IT director said. One way is through a summer employment program for upperclassmen that teaches how to use real-world IT products, like VMware and Cisco Meraki technologies. The district previously relied on VMware-based virtual machines (VMs) for creating "very easily and accessible" test environments for these students. But the school is no longer able to provide that opportunity, creating a learning "barrier," as the IT director put it. The IT director told Ars that dealing with a migration could be "catastrophic in that that's too much work for one person," adding: "It could be a chokehold, essentially, to where they're going to be basically forced into switching platforms -- maybe before they were anticipating -- or paying exorbitant prices that have skyrocketed for absolutely no reason. Nothing on the software side has changed. It's the same software. There's no features being added. Nobody's benefiting from the higher prices on the education side."

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