Are you a big fan of Microsoft Copilot? It's easy to assume that the Redmond giant's AI offering has gotten a bit stale, especially after dropping the Copilot+ brand from its laptops. However, according to one employee, Copilot is going stronger than ever, and people actually love it.

The United Nations logo on a gate outside the UN headquarters in New York. | AFP via Getty Images Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) statistics site over 16,000 times between April and June. While the incident doesn't quite rise to the level of the Hugging Face hack, or the recent attacks on US government sites, it's yet another concerning example of AI agents going outside the normal bounds to accomplish a task.According to Howard-Jones, the agents were likely tasked with retrieving publicly available data related to the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) through the UNCTADstat API. However, the agents did not appear to have direct API access and …Read the full story at The Verge.

Local AI agents are the private, free take on tools like Claude Code. And the idea is super appealing if you're trying to avoid a subscription and keep your data private. A local agent runs on whatever model is already on your disk, so you hand it a folder with a regular job you'd give to any other agent, but nothing ever goes to an unknown server. I think that's a pretty easy sell.

It's the most natural home lab move there is. You buy a managed switch, carve your network into VLANs, and then drop a cheap five-port unmanaged switch in the office or behind the TV because you ran out of ports. It works, so you forget about it. That's exactly the problem, and most rundowns of the things you need to know before setting up VLANs on your home network never mention it.

Why is it that important emails always pass the first, second, and third read-throughs with zero issues, but as soon as you hit send, you instantly see every single flaw in your writing? Well, it turns out it affects more people than I thought, and Microsoft is adding a new Outlook feature that will pull you aside when you click send and ask if you really, truly want to send the email where you grossly misspelled 'accommodation' at least three times.

AI coding tools have reached a point where they can all build something that looks impressive at first glance. The real difference shows up when I start paying attention to the smaller things like spacing, component behavior, consistency, and whether the final app actually feels thoughtfully put together.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 145, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I'm happy to be done traveling for a bit, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I flew to San Francisco to try out Meta's new hardware, including the impressive Meta VR Glasses. Along the way, I've been listening to Joanna Stern's interview with Mark Zuckerberg, watching this interview with new Apple CEO John Ternus, revisiting Steve Jobs' "Antennagate" press conference Q&A, playing games on my Steam Deck using the Xreal One Pro glasses, and reading Sarah Wynn-William …Read the full story at The Verge.

The idea was big, exciting, and inspiring: What if we could get every kid in the world access to a computer? For a bunch of thinkers and executives in Silicon Valley, it felt like the way to fix everything. But the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and the XO-1 laptop designed to be given away, were both more complicated than anyone expected.In the next episode of Version History, David Pierce is joined by The Verge's Adi Robertson and tech journalist David Imel to figure out why OLPC didn't work, whether there's anything to learn from the XO-1's innovative design, and if this kind of computer giveaway could ever succeed.We're halfway t …Read the full story at The Verge.

As a newcomer to the Linux scene, I didn't have the pleasure of using it back in the 2000s. I only just recently learned that the K in KDE used to stand for 'Kool', and these days, it literally just stands for 'K'. If you're like me and want a taste of what old KDE looked like, someone has reconstructed KDE 3's interface to work with KDE Plasma 6, and yes, it supports Wayland.

There's nothing more fascinating to me than seeing a familiar utility's name pop up on my WizTree every time I decide to audit my SSD and see what's taking up my increasingly expensive M.2 NVMe storage. It has become something of a ritual, and it usually ends with me deleting something Windows put there without asking as it always does.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the fragile state of your connected devices, follow Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it startedA decade ago, a group of former Apple engineers built a beautiful smart oven. With a built-in scale, restaurant-grade heating elements, a camera, and the intelligence to recognize a chicken breast and cook it perfectly, the June Oven set the standard for smart cooking appliances. At $1,495, it was absurdly expensive, but it quickly grew a smal …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft rolled out a security patch that turned my reliable Ubuntu partition into a brick. In August 2024, a Windows update applying a Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT) patch flagged vulnerable GRUB bootloaders, locking out thousands of dual-boot users worldwide. I was one among several users who encountered a "Security Policy Violation" error instead of the familiarity of a login screen, and I wish I could say things have improved since.