InfoWorld

A newly disclosed malware strain dubbed “StoatWaffle” is giving fresh teeth to the notorious, developer-targeting “Contagious Interview” threat campaign. According to NTT Security findings, the malware marks an evolution from the long-running campaign’s user-triggered execution to a near-frictionless compromise embedded directly in developer workflows. Attackers are using blockchain-themed projec…

Ensuring reliable and scalable context management in production environments is one of the most persistent challenges in applied AI systems. As organizations move from experimenting with large language models (LLMs) to embedding them deeply into real applications, context has become the dominant bottleneck. Accuracy, reliability, and trust all depend on whether an AI system can consistently reaso…

Many organizations are under pressure to take their AI agent experiments and proof of concepts out of pilots and into production. Devops teams may have limited time to ensure these AI agents meet AI agent non-negotiable requirements for production deployments, including implementing observability, monitoring, and other agenticops practices . One question devops teams must answer is what their min…

Cloud-native microservices are built for resilience, but true fault tolerance requires more than automatic retries. In complex distributed systems, a single failure can cascade across multiple services, databases, caches or third-party APIs, causing widespread disruptions. Traditional retry mechanisms, if applied blindly, can exacerbate failures and create what is known as a retry storm, an expon…

If you look at Microsoft as a collection of product lines, it is easy to conclude that Windows 11 and Azure occupy different universes. One is a client operating system that has irritated its users, confused administrators, and pushed hardware refresh cycles in ways many customers did not want. The other is a hyperscale cloud platform selling compute, storage, data services, and AI infrastructure…

With Microsoft now releasing stable updates to its Visual Studio Code editor weekly instead of just monthly, VS Code Versions 1.112 and 1.111 recently have been released, featuring capabilities such as agent troubleshooting, integrated browser debugging, and Copilot CLI permissions. Also featured is the deprecation of VS Code’s Edit Mode. VS Code 1.112 was released March 18 , while VS Code 1.111 …

It seems we are in a very perplexing and somewhat worrisome time in the technology job market. Artificial intelligence is disrupting workflows and changing job descriptions, while many companies are shedding staff due to years of “overhiring.” Some companies are freezing hiring due to market uncertainty. Whether you are seeking a full-time position or contracting work, AI—for better or worse—has …

Persistent weak layers (PWLs) have plagued my backcountry skiing for the past 10 years. They’re about to mess up the industry’s IT security, too. For those who don’t spend their early mornings skinning up mountains in Utah’s backcountry, a persistent weak layer, or PWL, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a fragile layer of snow, often faceted crystals that form during cold and dry spells, which…

OpenAI is reportedly planning to fold its ChatGPT application, Codex coding platform, and AI-powered browser into a single desktop ‘superapp’, a move that signals a shift toward enterprise and developer audiences and away from the consumer market that made the company a household name. The unified product will merge the ChatGPT interface, the Codex coding tool, and OpenAI’s browser known internal…

Google is introducing AI into its Stitch UI design tool, enabling anyone to create user-interface designs by describing them in natural language or using markdown . It can also be used to copy the design of an existing web page — or “easily extract a design system from any URL,” as Google put it in a blog post describing the new feature. The thinking behind the development is that users will ofte…

Google will no longer accept AI-generated submissions to a program it funded to find bugs in open-source software. However, it is contributing to a separate program that uses AI to strengthen security in open-source code. The Google Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program team is increasingly concerned about the low quality of some AI-generated bug submissions, with many including hallu…

“ A single training run can emit as much CO₂ as five cars do in a year. ” That finding from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has become the defining statistic of the generative AI era. But for the engineers and data scientists staring at a terminal, the problem isn’t just carbon, it’s the cloud bill. The industry narrative suggests that the only solution is hardware: buying newer H100s o…

When you scroll through Instagram Reels or browse YouTube, the seamless flow of content feels like magic. But behind that curtain lies a massive, energy-hungry machine. As a software engineer working on recommendation systems at Meta and now Google, I’ve seen firsthand how the quest for better AI models often collides with the physical limits of computing power and energy consumption. We often ta…

A key move in Google’s effort is a complete redesign of the Stitch UI. New plans for Stitch were announced March 18 . With vibe designing, developers can explore ideas quickly, leading to a higher quality outcome. Instead of starting with a wireframe, developers can start by explaining the business objective they hope to achieve, what they want users to feel, or even examples of what is currently…

OpenAI is acquiring Python developer toolmaker Astral, thus bringing open source developer tools into OpenAI’s Codex AI coding system. The acquisition was announced on March 19 . Elaborating on the deal, OpenAI said Astral has built widely used open source Python tools , helping developers move faster with modern tools such as uv, Ruff, and ty . These tools power millions of developer workflows a…