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You’re hunched over your desk and phone for hours. I rounded up gadgets, a DIY trick, and even some yoga advice to help you straighten up.

Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever. In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two unnamed suspects from Western Australia, aged 21 and 23, were arrested in connection with a "sophisticated cybercrime syndicate that allegedly created malicious open-source software to rob thousands of global businesses." The AFP did not name the defendants, but KrebsOnSecurity learned the 21-year-old suspect's real identity in June, and has been communicating with him ever since. This story includes interviews with TeamPCP's self-described spokesperson, and examines clues left behind by the TeamPCP leader that likely led to his undoing.

You have questions about data centers, and WIRED has answers. Join our livestream on September 10 and our panel of experts will tell you everything you need to know.

We're expecting to see the Galaxy S26 FE at today's Unpacked, but might there be any surprises?

The Relay Q, due next year, is the latest attempt to reposition voice as the most seamless method for human-computer interaction.

Let us help you choose the right Pixel phone. Plus, check out our Pixel accessory recommendations and smart software tricks to try.

EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country. One thing that could help turn that around? Slate Auto’s new truck—a vehicle that seems…

Let's be honest: async validation is the part of any forms library where you brace yourself. Debouncing, cancelling the request the user just invalidated by typing another character, keeping a "checking..." spinner honest, not letting a slow response overwrite a fast one. Every library that has ever done this has grown a pile of bespoke machinery for it. So when Signal Forms shipped validateHttp() and it just worked, I wanted to see the pile. I opened the source expecting a few hundred lines of async bookkeeping, and instead found a function whose entire body is a single call to something else. That turned into a trace all the way down, from a form field to the line where bytes actually leave the browser. Six layers, and only two of them add anything you could call new async machinery. ✅ Availability: validateHttp() is @publicApi 22.0 , stable. Every source reference in this article is pinned to the v22.1.1 tag , so the line numbers stay valid even as main moves. 🧩 The View From Outside The usage is unremarkable, which is the point. You declare that a field validates against an endpoint, and you're done: const schema = form ( this . model , ( path ) => { validateHttp ( path . username , { request : ({ value }) => `/api/username-available?u= ${ value ()} ` , debounce : 300 , onError : () => ({ kind : ' server-unreachable ' }), onSuccess : ( res : { available : boolean }) => res . available ? undefined : { kind : ' username-taken ' }, }); }); Sync validators run first, the request waits until they pass, field().pending() is true while it's in flight, and typing again cancels the previous call. If you've read Part 3 of my Signal Forms series , that's the behaviour contract you already know. The question here is who implements it. 🔍 Layer 1: validateHttp() Is a Delegation Here is the whole function, from validate_http.ts : export function validateHttp ( path , opts ) { validateAsync ( path , { params : opts . request , debounce : opts . debounce , factory : ( request )

Cloudflare announced Wallets, giving agents a stablecoin balance and spending controls, though only handle claiming is live and squatting complaints have already surfaced. Payments run on x402, now hosted by the Linux Foundation. The controls bound single payments, not sequences, leaving composition to the application above. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Java Service Steward is a new Windows service host for Java applications. It reads the wrapper.conf format used by the Java Service Wrapper, follows the same command line and log format, and is licensed Apache-2.0 OR MIT. I wrote it because the Community Edition of the Java Service Wrapper has no 64-bit Windows build, and I did not want to buy a license or rewrite the service integration of applications that already had working configuration files. Repository: https://github.com/jayyanez/java-service-steward What it is The distribution is two files, wrapper.exe and wrapper.jar . The executable is written in Rust and does the Windows part: it registers the service, launches the JVM, keeps a control channel to it over a loopback socket, restarts it when it exits unexpectedly or stops answering pings, writes and rotates wrapper.log , and handles Service Control Manager requests (stop, pause, resume, custom control codes). The JAR is compiled for Java 8 and contains the launcher classes and a small API. There is no native DLL and no JNI. It only runs on 64-bit Windows. There is no Unix version. What is compatible Configuration. wrapper.conf with #include , #encoding , set.VAR=value , %VAR% expansion and numbered properties such as wrapper.java.additional.<n> . Relative paths resolve from the executable's directory, as before. Command line. -c runs in a console, -i and -r install and remove the service, -t and -p start and stop it, -q queries it, -d requests a thread dump. Property overrides on the command line and -- pass-through of application arguments work the same way. Service registration. An installed service's ImagePath calls wrapper.exe -s <conf> , so an existing registration keeps working. Log format. Records use the same LPTM layout, the same column widths and the same SIZE , WRAPPER and JVM roll modes, so scripts that parse wrapper.log do not need changes. Launchers. A configuration that names the original SimpleApp , StartStopApp or JarApp launcher in wrappe

Langfuse with Microsoft.Extensions.AI has an appealing story: update prompts without redeploying. A prompt fetches its config blob—model, tokens, temperature—which the code passes straight to the LLM. It works. But it puts a boundary in what I'd suggest might be better placed elsewhere — and moving it is a small enough change to be worth exploring. This post is about where to move that line in a .NET codebase using Microsoft.Extensions.AI against OpenAI or Azure OpenAI, with Langfuse as the source of prompts. What the current setup buys you Let me be fair to it first, because the coupling is a deliberate design, not an accident. Langfuse's prompt config is an optional JSON object versioned alongside the prompt. That means someone can open the Langfuse UI, change the model or a parameter, and ship it — no code change, no redeploy. Combined with labels (pointers to specific versions that your code references), a rollback is just moving the production label back to an earlier version. For prompt content iteration, that story is genuinely good, and there is a real audience of people who want model config coupled to prompt versions more tightly so each version is fully self-describing and reproducible. So this is a trade-off, not a bug. The question is whether the thing you are optimizing for — non-engineers tuning prompts without a deploy — is worth what the coupling costs. Why I think this deserves consideration Three points stand out. It is an untyped blob feeding provider selection. The Langfuse config is arbitrary JSON without schema enforcement. On the other end, whatever LLM plumbing you use will treat that model string as authoritative. A missing key, a stray max_tokens , or a gpt4o typo might not fail at build time or deploy time — it could fail on a live request, or silently do something unintended. You have a loosely-typed value driving an infrastructure decision, and the mistake may not surface until traffic hits it. It conflates two change lifecycles with di

I wanted to see how far I could take a simple idea: Give an agent one API key and let it handle the different pieces of company research. So I built GTM Radar . You paste a company URL, and it turns that into a structured GTM brief instead of making you jump between different research and data tools. What GTM Radar does The workflow currently generates five main sections: Overview — company description, industry, size, location and website Structure — departments and key people Market — signals, competitors and positioning People — who might be relevant to reach and why Outreach — why now and a possible angle The goal is simple: go from company URL → useful GTM context as quickly as possible. Why Vaaya? The interesting part for me was being able to connect several providers through Vaaya rather than integrating each one separately. The workflow currently uses: Firecrawl · Exa · Akta · OpenFunnel · OneFind through a single Vaaya key. Vaaya's API provides a common interface for its catalog, so the workflow can call different services using the same API authentication and request pattern. It also supports cost limits and only charges successful calls. That made experimenting with different providers much easier. The workflow At a high level: Company URL ↓ Company discovery / extraction ↓ Company + market research ↓ People & GTM signals ↓ Structured GTM brief ↓ Share / copy / reuse The interesting part isn't any individual API call. It's combining several data sources into something that is actually useful to a person doing GTM research. Handling failures Real-world data workflows don't always return clean results. For extraction, I added a fallback path so that if the first provider doesn't work, the workflow can try another route instead of immediately failing. The current flow is roughly: CRW ↓ Firecrawl scrape ↓ CRW fallback I also added cost-capped runs and a 12-hour cache to avoid unnecessary repeated work. Sharing the research The latest thing I added was Share I

One thing I learned from working with experienced engineers is that solving a problem and approaching a problem are two different skills. During one of my projects, I had the opportunity to work closely with Microsoft engineers. Since I was working independently, whenever I faced an issue, I would first spend time exploring it myself. I would check the data, logs, code, test different possibilities, and eventually figure out a solution. But sometimes, when I discussed the same issue with them, I was surprised by how differently they approached it. Instead of immediately looking for a fix, they would pause and ask a few simple but thoughtful questions. Those questions often narrowed the scope of the problem quickly and helped uncover the root cause much faster than trial and error. Over time, I started adopting that mindset. I learned that spending more time understanding why something is happening often leads to a better outcome than rushing into how to fix it. I also picked up many small but valuable engineering habits from everyday discussions, habits that continue to help me in my work today. Courses and certifications definitely help us learn new technologies. But some of the best learning in my career has simply come from working with skilled people, observing how they think, and applying those learnings in my own way. Grateful for the experiences, mentorship, and the people who generously shared their knowledge along the way. Learning #ProblemSolving #CareerGrowth #DataEngineering #GrowthMindset #ProfessionalDevelopment

By Shivkrishna Shah · Engineer Philosophy — @shivkrishnashah · @engineerphilosophy Your app shouldn't have a "no internet" screen. Here's the architecture I use to make mobile apps write locally, sync automatically, and survive the messy reality of field connectivity. Every mobile developer has shipped this screen at least once: a sad cloud icon and the words "No internet connection. Please try again." For consumer apps, that's an annoyance. For enterprise field apps — sales reps in hospital basements, auditors in warehouses, technicians in rural areas — it's a dealbreaker. If the app stops working when the signal drops, people stop trusting it. And once field users stop trusting an app, they go back to paper and WhatsApp. I spent the last few years building and maintaining an offline-first React Native platform used daily by field teams across multiple countries. This post is the architecture I wish someone had handed me on day one: how to structure local storage, detect connectivity, queue writes, auto-sync in the background, and avoid the two bugs that will absolutely bite you (duplicates and conflicts). Everything here is generic — I'll use Realm DB and NetInfo in the examples, but the pattern maps cleanly onto WatermelonDB, SQLite, or MMKV-backed queues. The one rule that changes everything The local database is the source of truth. The server is just a replica you happen to reconcile with. Most apps are built the other way around: the server is the truth, and the app is a thin cache over fetch() . Offline-first inverts this. Every read comes from the local DB. Every write goes to the local DB first. The network is an implementation detail that a background service worries about — never the UI. This single inversion gives you three things for free: Zero-latency UX. Saves are instant because they're local writes. No spinners on submit. Airplane-mode parity. The app behaves identically online and offline, because the UI never talks to the network. Crash safety. D

The UK’s energy regulator is using a variety of tricks to keep speculative data center projects from plugging into the power grid. The country’s AI ambitions hang in the balance.

A few weeks ago I wrote about hitting ReAct in the coursework and having a record scratch moment, because I had already met it without knowing its name. That post ended on a section called "Building Ahead of Understanding," which was me making peace with shipping things before I fully understand them. This week I shipped my first chatbot. It passed on the first attempt, on deadline day, on a project where the rubric was grading a product AWS had already discontinued. And I spent most of that day quietly worried that it did not count. Let me be clear about what the worry was, because it was not about cheating. Using AI agents to build a coding project is allowed here. I asked before I started, I got a yes, and I disclosed the whole arrangement in my README, including a section that names what each tool did and what I did. Nobody was misled about how this got built. The worry was smaller and more personal than that. I still did not type the code. My agents did. I directed, I validated, I decided, and underneath all of it was a small voice asking whether directing is the same as knowing. Whether a person who cannot write a Bedrock call from memory gets to say they learned Bedrock. Here is what I found out. The starter files were a generation behind the instructions Some context on where this came from. AWS AI & ML Scholars is a program AWS runs with Udacity, open to anyone 18 or over with no prior experience required. Everyone starts in a Challenge phase built on the AWS Certified AI Practitioner material, and the top 4,500 finishers get a fully funded nanodegree in one of three tracks: AI Programmer, Agentic AI Business Professional, or Agent Developer. I am in Agent Developer, the Bedrock AgentCore and multi-agent systems path. This chatbot is the first of its three projects. The project is a customer support chatbot on the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore managed harness. Three routes, one system prompt. A bug report gets collected across turns and filed to DynamoDB through

Scalable Guardrail Service ASP.NET Core Kubernetes: Architecture, Code, and Ops Quick Answer Scalable Guardrail Service ASP.NET Core Kubernetes: A dedicated ASP.NET Core guardrail microservice on Kubernetes validates LLM requests, enables instant policy updates via Redis, and scales with custom HPA for high‑throughput. Scalable Guardrail Service ASP.NET Core Kubernetes: Why a Dedicated Guardrail Microservice Matters When you expose an LLM‑powered API to the world, every request is a potential compliance risk. A single malformed prompt can surface PII, trigger a policy violation, or even cause a brand‑damaging output. In my experience, the first version of such a system is a set of ad‑hoc filters sprinkled across controllers. Under load, those filters become latency bottlenecks, policy updates race, and audit trails vanish. The root cause is a missing architectural layer that treats guardrails as a first‑class microservice that can scale horizontally, be updated live, and be observed independently. Guardrail Layer Requirements We need a guardrail layer that: Validates every request before it hits the LLM engine. Can be updated without redeploying the entire API surface. Provides per‑tenant isolation and versioning. Logs every decision for compliance and red‑team analysis. Runs at the same scale as the LLM inference service. When This Fails in Production Policy updates are applied via a shared ConfigMap and the pods do not reload, so new rules are never enforced. The guardrail service is single‑instance; a spike in requests triggers a queue that exceeds the LLM engine’s rate limit, causing a cascading failure. Audit logs are written to local disk; a pod crash loses events. Latency spikes because each request performs a synchronous Redis lookup for every policy. Common Mistakes Engineers Make Embedding guardrail logic inside the API controller rather than a dedicated middleware. Using in‑memory policy caches without a TTL, leading to stale rules. Ignoring the fact that

Key takeaways pgvector can reduce vector storage costs by 50% or more. Utilizing PostgreSQL's indexing capabilities enhances performance. Operational simplicity with a unified database reduces overhead. Cost-effective scaling is achievable with the right configurations. The problem Startups leveraging AI and machine learning often face skyrocketing costs associated with dedicated vector databases as they scale. These costs can escalate quickly due to the pricing structures of specialized services, which charge based on storage and query volume. Founders typically hit this wall when user growth surges or when the complexity of vector retrievals increases, leading to budget overruns and performance bottlenecks. What we found Interestingly, many startups overlook the capabilities of pgvector, a PostgreSQL extension that supports vector similarity search. With proper indexing and configuration, pgvector can match or even exceed the performance of dedicated vector stores while significantly reducing costs. The non-obvious insight is that by leveraging existing PostgreSQL infrastructure, startups can avoid the pitfalls of vendor lock-in and unpredictable scaling costs associated with specialized vector databases. How to implement it Begin by integrating pgvector into your existing PostgreSQL setup. First, install the pgvector extension using the command: CREATE EXTENSION vector; . Next, define your vector columns with the appropriate dimensionality, for example, CREATE TABLE items (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, embedding VECTOR(300)); . Utilize PostgreSQL's GiST or ivfflat indexing for efficient similarity searches. Implement batch insertion techniques to optimize write throughput, and consider partitioning your data to manage large datasets effectively. Regularly monitor query performance and adjust your indexing strategy based on usage patterns. How this makes life easier By utilizing pgvector, startups can expect to reduce their vector storage costs by 50% or more compared to

Choosing Angular in the Age of Agents Brandon Roberts Brandon Roberts Brandon Roberts Follow Jul 30 Choosing Angular in the Age of Agents # angular # ai 37 reactions 4 comments 9 min read

How AI Helps Us Explore the Universe Modern telescopes and space missions generate more data in a single night than a team of human astronomers could review in a lifetime. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, for instance, is expected to produce up to seven million alerts every night once it reaches full operational cadence, each one flagging something in the sky that changed since the last image. No group of humans can look at that stream and make sense of it in real time. Machine learning can, and increasingly does. This is the quiet story behind most recent breakthroughs in astronomy: it is not just bigger telescopes, but bigger telescopes paired with models that can filter, classify, reconstruct, and predict faster than any manual pipeline. Here is a tour of where AI is actually doing that work, and why it matters to anyone who writes code. The Data Problem Comes First Space science has quietly become a big data problem. The Rubin Observatory's ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time will produce roughly 60 petabytes of raw imagery and catalog around 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars. Every image the telescope takes is compared, pixel by pixel, against previous images of the same patch of sky, and any meaningful difference (a moving asteroid, a brightening supernova, a flaring galactic nucleus) triggers an alert within about two minutes of the exposure being taken. That alert stream is too large and too fast for manual triage. So astronomers built software "brokers": machine learning classifiers that sit between the telescope's raw output and the scientists, deciding in near real time which alerts are worth a second look. This is a pattern you will see across almost every domain of modern astronomy: instruments generate more signal than humans can parse, and a model is inserted into the pipeline to do the first pass of filtering. Finding Planets in a Sea of Noise Exoplanets are found mostly through the transit method: a planet passes in front