InfoWorld

Careless developers publishing Visual Studio extensions to two open marketplaces have been including access tokens and other secrets that can be exploited by threat actors, a security vendor has found. The discovery was made earlier this year by researchers at Wiz, who quietly worked with Microsoft and its VSCode Marketplace as well as those behind the OpenVSX marketplace to improve guardrails in…

Just as Windows 10 has reached its end of life (EOL), issues with Windows 11 abound, the most recent an update that broke localhost for some developers, preventing them from accessing web apps running locally on their machines. The October 2025 cumulative update, (KB5066835), addressed security issues in Windows operating systems (OSes), but also appears to have blocked Windows’ ability to talk w…

The dream of self-directed AI is becoming real, and companies can’t wait to turn their agents loose on everyday workflows. Standards like the Model Context Protocol are helping agents move from chat to action, while new frameworks promise smoother integrations and smarter automation. But as these agents grow more autonomous—and start teaching themselves—so do the risks. From compliance to cyberse…

European organizations are increasingly vocal about their desire to reduce their reliance on US-based hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This goal stems from a growing need to achieve digital sovereignty, comply with stricter data privacy regulations, and counter geopolitical challenges that make it risky to depend on non-EU infrastructure. European policyma…

IT operations have long been defined by one overriding goal: keep applications running at all costs. Success was measured in uptime. Agentic AI systems break that assumption. Unlike traditional applications, agents are ephemeral, spinning up in response to a prompt or another agent’s request, performing a task, and then disappearing once the job is complete. Think less about managing a full-time …

Typing questions into a chatbot is nice, but speaking often feels more natural. In fact, some experts encourage people to talk to generative AI instead of typing, in part to get out of the habit of using them as glorified search engines. “If you haven’t tried voice chatting with an AI model to see the appeal, you should,” advises University of Pennsylvania professor Ethan Mollick, who studies inn…

Big changes to the license used by the popular open source key/value store Redis prompted a fork, with the launch of Valkey . In the time since that fork in March 2024, the two projects have diverged. The Valkey project is concentrating on performance improvements, with recent releases redesigning key low-level features to reduce memory usage and increase throughput. While core features stay simi…

A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign suggests that the loss of skills often seen when fine-tuning large AI models may not be true forgetting but a temporary bias in their output. By retraining only specific layers such as the self-attention and upper MLP components, researchers found that models could acquire new abilities while preserving older ones, reducing retraining c…

Python’s rich ecosystem of data science tools is a big draw for users. The only downside of such a broad and deep collection is that sometimes the best tools can get overlooked. Here’s a rundown of some of the best newer or less-known data science projects available for Python . Some, like Polars, are getting more attention but still deserve wider notice. Others, like ConnectorX, are hidden gems.…

Java microframeworks are generally lightweight and minimalistic, characterized by their emphasis on performance, cloud-native capabilities, and developer experience. They are designed for building lightweight web applications, and they’re particularly well-suited to microservices architectures. Although Spring Boot is the most common choice in this arena, different frameworks cater to different n…

If you’re a software developer and you don’t already know of Paul Graham and his wonderful essays , then you’re in for a treat. Graham writes about programming, running startups, and, well, life. As one of the original dotcom success stories and the founder of Y Combinator , Graham knows of what he writes. My personal favorite essay of his is Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule , wherein he disc…

Oracle has unveiled a new data lakehouse offering that supports Apache Iceberg to help enterprises streamline analytics and enhance data interoperability across cloud and on-premises environments. Enterprises focused on leveraging data for AI and analytics use cases have lately been turning to data lakehouses as they blend the affordability and scalability of data lakes with the performance of da…

Oracle is doubling down its focus on agentic use cases for enterprises with new features added to its latest long-term support version of its database offering — AI Database 26ai. The new database includes Select AI Agent, Agent Factory, and integration with Oracle’s MCP servers. AI Database 26ai, which has been made generally available, replaces the 2023-released Database 23c (later renamed to D…

Purpose-built clouds are cloud environments created and optimized for specific workloads, industries, or applications, rather than generic infrastructure that supports broad use cases. To better meet unique business needs, these clouds offer customizations across various layers of the technology stack, including hardware, software, and developer tools. Several factors are driving the increasing a…

The arrival of generative AI-enhanced business intelligence (GenBI) for enterprise data analytics has opened up access to insights, while also increasing the speed, relevance and accuracy of those insights. But that’s in best-case scenarios. Often, AI-powered analytics leads data teams to the same challenges: Hallucinations, security and governance snafus, outdated or incorrect answers, low famil…