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Windows 11 wants your trust. Microsoft keeps testing it

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Windows 11 wants your trust. Windows 11 has a habit of crying wolf. Users could get devoured by real threats as a result. Microsoft launched Windows 11 as the most secure Windows ever built--and the marketing was almost convincing at the time.


19 Chrome extensions were secretly stealing data. Uninstall these now

PCWorld

PCWorld warns that 19 Chrome and Edge extensions were found secretly stealing user data, including login details and crypto tokens, through hidden malware. The malicious campaign reportedly evaded detection for around two years, with attackers injecting harmful code into already popular extensions after they gained user trust. Google and Microsoft have removed these add-ons from their stores, but affected users must manually uninstall them to fully protect their devices. Security experts at Socket are warning about browser extensions for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge that contain malware. The accompanying report mentions a total of 19 add-ons that were deliberately infected with malicious code in order to intercept user data and steal access details to digital wallets.


Fake Chrome update scam could infect your computer

FOX News

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG . What Meta's new teen restrictions mean for young people What happens if the Waymo computer fails? Survivor's Christian Hubicki marvels at China's robotics games records: 'Willing to break the robots to do it' Chinese humanoid robot breaks Usain Bolt's 100m dash record at 9.39 seconds Meta social media settlement is a'reckoning': Dr Drew Pinsky Meta's social media settlement could reshape rules for kids online'CHUMP CHANGE': How a $17B settlement is a landmark for social, still good for Meta Smart refrigerators, cars and computers can show ads after updates, raising privacy and ownership concerns, Kurt CyberGuy Knutsson explains.


Microsoft Edge is about to lose uBlock Origin, too

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Microsoft's Edge team has posted a timeline for migrating away from Manifest Version 2, the extensions foundation upon which uBlock's superb uBlock Origin adblocker lives. Remember how one of the best adblockers, uBlock Origin, was effectively killed by Google Chrome? Throughout 2024 and 2025, Google said that it was migrating its extension support from what is called Manifest, from version 2 to version 3. Now Microsoft says that it is following Google's lead, and beginning that transition as well. Ads stink, and anyone who says that they don't affect productivity has never turned off an adblocker and tried to surf a major media site, including our own.


Adobe's new ChatGPT plugin brings 70 of its tools to OpenAI's chatbot

Engadget

At the end of last year, Adobe leveraged OpenAI's Apps SDK to bring Photoshop, Acrobat and Adobe Express to ChatGPT. Now, the company is bringing nearly its entire suite of creative apps to ChatGPT with the introduction of the Adobe plugin. All told, once you've added the extension to your account, you'll have access to more than 70 of Adobe's tools, including Photoshop, Premiere, Acrobat, Lightroom, Illustrator and InDesign. To add the extension, open ChatGPT's settings menu and navigate to the plugins section, then select the Adobe one. You can then invoke it by typing @Adobe into ChatGPT's prompt bar, followed by your request.


'Free' World Cup streams are spreading scams, not soccer

PCWorld

PCWorld reports that'free' World Cup streaming sites are often scams delivering malicious ads, malware, and unwanted subscriptions instead of legitimate soccer content. Cybercriminals exploit these fake streams to trick users into clicking hidden malicious links, while legitimate alternatives include official streaming trials and reputable international services. Users should verify free services by checking for clear business models, established company histories, and proper terms of service before accessing any content.


Geometric Algorithms for Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Constraints

Neural Information Processing Systems

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for Combinatorial Optimization (CO) is an emerging paradigm for solving combinatorial problems using neural networks. In this paper, we address a central challenge of SSL for CO: solving problems with discrete constraints. We design an end-to-end differentiable framework that enables us to solve discrete constrained optimization problems with neural networks. Concretely, we leverage algorithmic techniques from the literature on convex geometry and Carathรฉodory's theorem to decompose neural network outputs into convex combinations of polytope corners that correspond to feasible sets. This decomposition-based approach enables self-supervised training but also ensures efficient quality-preserving rounding of the neural net output into feasible solutions. Extensive experiments in cardinality-constrained optimization show that our approach can consistently outperform neural baselines. We further provide workedout examples of how our method can be applied beyond cardinality-constrained problems to a diverse set of combinatorial optimization tasks, including finding independent sets in graphs, and solving matroid-constrained problems.


Effective Policy Learning for Multi-Agent Online Coordination Beyond Submodular Objectives

Neural Information Processing Systems

The first one, MA-SPL, not only can achieve the optimal (1 ce)-approximation guarantee for the MA-OC problem with submodular objectives but also can handle the unexplored ฮฑ-weakly DR-submodular and (ฮณ,ฮฒ)-weakly submodular scenarios, where c is the curvature of the investigated submodular functions, ฮฑ denotes the diminishing-return(DR) ratio and the tuple (ฮณ,ฮฒ) represents the submodularity ratios. Subsequently, in order to reduce the reliance on the unknown parameters ฮฑ,ฮณ,ฮฒ inherent in the MA-SPLalgorithm, we further introduce the second online algorithm named MA-MPL. This MA-MPL algorithm is entirely parameter-free and simultaneously can maintain the same approximation ratio as the first MA-SPL algorithm. The core of our MA-SPL and MA-MPL algorithms is a novel continuous-relaxation technique termed as policybased continuous extension. Compared with the well-established multi-linear extension, a notable advantage of this new policy-based continuous extension is its ability to provide a lossless rounding scheme for any set function, thereby enabling us to tackle the challenging weakly submodular objectives. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.


OPENCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities as computer-use agents (CUAs) capable of automating diverse computer tasks. As their commercial potential grows, critical details of the most capable CUA systems remain closed. As these agents will increasingly mediate digital interactions and execute consequential decisions on our behalf, the research community needs access to open CUA frameworks to study their capabilities, limitations, and risks. To bridge this gap, we propose OPENCUA, a comprehensive open-source framework for scaling CUA data and foundation models. Our framework consists of: (1) an annotation infrastructure that seamlessly captures human computer-use demonstrations; (2) AGENTNET, the first large-scale computer-use task dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ applications and websites; (3) a scalable pipeline that transforms demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long Chain-of-Thought reasoning that sustain robust performance gains as data scales.


Differentiable Extensions with Rounding Guarantees for Combinatorial Optimization over Permutations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Continuously extending combinatorial optimization objectives is a powerful technique commonly applied to the optimization of set functions. However, few such methods exist for extending functions on permutations, despite the fact that many combinatorial optimization problems, such as the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) and the traveling salesperson problem (TSP), are inherently optimization over permutations.