Computerworld – AI

Google’s new Googlebooks are packed with potential — and while the systems in their current state may be awkwardly rough around the edges, there are some truly interesting ideas within ’em. I looked at some of those highlights in my recent “Googlebook work test” hands-on analysis, but in addition to all the surface-level sorcery, Googlebooks hide a handful of nifty and at times quite helpful features you wouldn’t notice until you’d really spent some time using ’em and poking around in their various nooks and crannies. As a follow-up to my broader Googlebook analysis, I thought it’d be fun to s

I was taking my dog for her perambulation through the leafy valleys and forests of one of the most densely populated parts of London this morning when it struck me how annoying it has become that I must now update multiple Apple devices across my family group. That’s pretty much mandatory given recent security warnings, and may involve additional updates over time. “Why must I spend so much time updating other people’s stuff?” I asked myself, managing to combine resentment and self-pity within one short sentence. “Why can’t they learn how to update their own stuff?” I muttered, dreaming once a

Every IT and security team knows the feeling of opening a vulnerability report and seeing a number that only goes up. Thousands of findings. Hundreds marked critical. A backlog that grows faster than any team can close it. For years, the default response has been to work harder: more scans, more tickets, more overtime. But the volume of vulnerabilities, accelerated by AI-assisted discovery and a sprawling mix of endpoints, cloud services, and applications, has outpaced that approach. Shift from vulnerability counts to exposure reduction → The question has shifted from, “How do we fix everythin

For most IT teams, Patch Tuesday used to set the rhythm of the month. Updates arrived, teams tested them, change boards approved them, and deployments rolled out over the following weeks. It wasn’t painless, but it was predictable. That predictability is gone. Nearly 48,000 CVEs were published in 2025, and the average time to exploit has collapsed to roughly five days. Attackers no longer wait for organizations to finish their testing cycles. Move from reactive patching to risk-based automation → Many practitioners now call this the Patch Apocalypse. The name is dramatic, but the operational r

For the past few years, most enterprise AI has been advisory. It summarized tickets, drafted knowledge articles, and suggested next steps. A person still decided what to do. That’s changing. Agentic AI systems can plan multistep tasks and carry them out: querying systems, triggering workflows, changing configurations, and closing tickets with little or no human involvement. Ivanti’s 2026 State of Cybersecurity Report found that 87% of security professionals say integrating agentic AI is a priority, and 77% report at least some comfort letting autonomous systems act without human review. Secure

“Hallucination” has become the catch-all term for AI getting things wrong. It describes a real phenomenon: Large language models can generate confident, fluent answers that are simply untrue. But in IT operations, many errors labeled as hallucinations have a more ordinary explanation. The AI isn’t inventing facts. It’s faithfully reporting information that happens to be outdated, incomplete, or contradictory. I’ve seen this play out across enough environments to know the cause usually sits upstream, in the data the system learned from and the picture of the estate it read. Fix the data foundat

Ask an IT team a simple question, “How many laptops do we have?” and the answer often depends on who you ask and which console they open. For years, that ambiguity was manageable. People reconciled the differences in their heads, in spreadsheets, or in meetings. Ivanti research shows that 34% of organizations still track IT assets in spreadsheets, which shows how much reconciliation still happens by hand. Build the authoritative data source your AI can act on → Automation changes the stakes. When software acts on data without a person double-checking it first, the question of which data is cor

Private keys associated with eight intermediate certificate authorities operated by Indian digital trust provider eMudhra have been compromised, potentially allowing attackers to forge trusted certificates and impersonate websites or services, according to Google and Mozilla. “On 17th October @ 20:06 UTC, Mozilla received a report to certificates@mozilla.org, forwarded by the Chrome Root program, that the private key of 8 eMudhra Intermediate certificates have been compromised,” Dennis Jackson, a member of Mozilla’s engineering team, wrote in a public Mozilla bug report. “An attacker with the

Employers are getting pickier when looking at tech resumes, but competition for the right skills is still intense. Companies will pay a premium for experience and advanced AI skills. “The market is no longer defined simply by how many people employers hire, but by how precisely they hire,” said Ger Doyle, ManpowerGroup’s regional president for North America. In many cases, employers would rather leave a position open than make the wrong hire, Doyle said. AI fluency and expertise are driving higher salaries, talent consulting firm Robert Half said after surveying more than 2,000 hiring managers

The embargo for iPhone Duo reviews has broken, which means dozens of reviews have appeared all at once. It’s like sitting in an empty office with all the phones ringing at the same time. No one can answer all of them. So, what are reviewers saying about Apple’s new $2,000 product? What’s hot? What’s not? And what’s next? Let’s begin with the criticisms. Almost every review I read is critical about the same things: the lack of a telephoto lens on the camera, the decision to use Touch ID, and lagging third-party software support for the device, with some criticism of the FaceTime camera. To be f

Microsoft expanded its sovereign cloud offerings on Tuesday, adding new security, governance and AI capabilities as customers, particularly in Europe, demand greater assurance over where data is stored, who can access it and how critical services operate during disruptions. The announcement builds on Microsoft’s ongoing digital sovereignty efforts, assisting organizations in applying appropriate levels of control to each workload rather than forcing a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach. “Organizations are considering more than where data resides. They also seek to understand who can access and

When an AI pilot in IT operations underdelivers, the first instinct is to question the technology. Was the model wrong? Did the tool overpromise? Did the team pick the wrong use case? Those are fair questions. But in many organizations, the answer sits somewhere less glamorous: in a configuration management database that hasn’t been reconciled in two years, in asset data in spreadsheets, or in a service desk where three teams use the same category field in three different ways. Transform fragmented IT data into the trusted data foundation AI needs → AI doesn’t create these problems. It surface

In a weird way, I’ve been thinking about the idea of a Googlebook for well over a decade now — despite the fact that such a product has only officially existed for a matter of months. I’m relatively unusual in the world of tech journalism, y’see, in that I’ve been both writing about Android and ChromeOS since the platforms’ earliest days and actively using devices from both ends of those ecosystems in my own day-to-day life that entire time. Most tech writers tend to be iPhone owners and Chromebook skeptics who see this part of the digital world from an outside view — once a year or so, when s

The UK wants to take a chunk out of Apple Pay, as the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) moves to force Apple to open access to its 12-year-old contactless payment system to rivals. The regulator has published a consultation document that proposes requiring Apple to allow competitors to use the near-field communication (NFC) chip on its devices to enable alternative payment systems on iOS on “fair, reasonable, transparent and non-discriminatory terms.” The regulator says action is required because UK businesses have complained that Apple’s existing NFC access arrangements are not commerci

In Meta commercial terms changes slated to kick in on October 30, the company will shift the liability for any mistakes made by its AI models to its enterprise customers. The new language also makes those IT executives responsible for anything done by a partner or contractor. The changes also finally put a stake into the heart of robots.txt, with Meta granting itself the right to grab, and use for its own purposes, any content associated with a Meta account. The language allows Meta to “use automated software such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents and create tes

In olden days — last year, say — employees using unsanctioned AI tools might copy-and-paste sensitive data that could end up in the AI company’s training data set. Today, an unsanctioned AI can hack into another company for an employee even if they didn’t explicitly ask it to. This doesn’t just mean the latest unreleased frontier models undergoing security testing. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini have all evolved from being mere chatbots, answering questions and helping people write emails. They now have agentic capabilities and are able to carry out complex tasks on behalf of users. And they do,

It’s all relative, but if you want to scope out the likely shape of the tech device industry in five years’ time, you have to think of the likely shape of the replacement cycle, and right now it seems to be shifting toward Apple. That’s going to become more important to tech purchasing as the years roll by and is also likely why you’ll see other manufacturers become even more competitive as they try to stop the tide. It is open to question if they will be able to do so, given that even five years ago Apple still seemed far less dominant, which is no longer the case. Shrink when you’re winning

Microsoft’s October 2026 Patch Tuesday is the year’s largest release, with 1,408 CVEs requiring customer action, 72 of them rated critical. September, the previous high, carried 963. One CVE is already exploited: CVE-2026-96951, a Windows Shell flaw that bypasses Mark of the Web. Two were publicly disclosed before release, in the .NET Framework and the MessagePack-CSharp library. Separately, on 25 September Microsoft reported attacks against CVE-2026-65660, a SharePoint Server flaw fixed in August. Readiness recommends a Patch Now scheduling for Windows, Office, Exchange and the developer tool

Long before Taco Tuesday became part of the pop-culture vernacular, Tuesdays were synonymous with security — and for anyone in the tech world, they still are. Patch Tuesday, as you most likely know, refers to the day each month when Microsoft releases security updates and patches for its software products — everything from Windows to Office to SQL Server, developer tools to browsers. The practice, which happens on the second Tuesday of the month, was initiated to streamline the patch distribution process and make it easier for users and IT system administrators to manage updates. Like tacos, P

Investors are pouring more into AI data center infrastructure than they can hope to recoup by 2030, according to Gartner. “Enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst Will Sommer. AI data center owners would need to generate $8.5 trillion in revenue through 2030 to cover announced capital spending, financing costs and expected investment returns, he said. “However, total enterprise and consumer AI revenue that can be attributed to AI data centers during thi