Safety Net Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Trending Now Mashable Selects Getting Technical with Mashable Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Versus In My Bag Mashable @Home All Series Hackers find a way to turn users' own AI agents and Downloads folders against them Beware: Your Downloads folder could hold instructions for your AI assistant that you definitely didn't write. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.

Safety Net Creator Playbook Trending Now Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Getting Technical with Mashable Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Say More Versus In My Bag Mashable @Home All Series Keep your family's important information organized and encrypted for $49 The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. When someone needs access to your important documents one day, you don't want them to dig through your emails and scramble through scraps of paper to find everything. The LegacyLocked Digital Estate Planning Vault gives you a single encrypted space to organize all the information your family might need.

The Dell Laptop Buying Guide UK: Which Dell Laptop Should You Buy? When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. New Outlook stores your settings in a hidden file. Reinstalling Outlook or switching PCs? Here's how to back up and restore your account settings with one simple file copy. For the past couple of years, Microsoft has made a concerted effort to move users from the classic Outlook app for Windows 11 to "new" Outlook, a web-based app.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Microsoft OneDrive wants to back up everything. You don't have to let it Microsoft's OneDrive is a valuable tool for archiving and backing up data. Its enthusiasm needs to be reined in, however. It's getting better, fortunately -- or at least it looks that way.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Though the initial cost might throw off some users, pCloud's yearly and lifetime plans are affordable in the long run and the service offers several ways to store and sync data via its versatile client software. That said, it's also a bit easier to get up to speed with than those others. I even like its lifetime pricing, as opposed to the usual monthly rate. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best online backup for comparison.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I used Perplexity's AI agent in Windows to tackle 5 complex tasks - here's what impressed me most No longer limited to the Mac, Perplexity's Personal Computer for Windows AI can complete complex tasks on your PC with little or no input from you. Agentic AI is designed to save you time and labor by handling complex, multi-step tasks on your computer with little or no interaction from you. Just describe the mission to your favorite AI, and it should complete the required steps all on its own. Among the companies rolling out their own agentic AIs, Perplexity has been touting its Personal Computer feature built into its desktop apps. Previously available only for the Mac, Perplexity Personal Computer recently expanded to Windows, supporting both Windows 11 and Windows 10. The only requirement is that you must subscribe to one of Perplexity's paid plans -- Pro, Max, or Enterprise.

Windows 11 quietly backs up your files to OneDrive. Windows 11's default OneDrive backup gives Microsoft access to your files. Windows 11 includes a backup tool which, by default, automatically backs up the user folders'Documents', 'Pictures' and'Desktop' to OneDrive in the cloud. On the one hand, this is good, as the feature protects users from data loss. However, it is not good that this backup runs opaquely in the background and, in the latest versions of Windows, can only be stopped after several prompts and mouse clicks.

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.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents show promising capabilities for automating computer-use tasks and facilitating accessibility, but existing interactive benchmarks are mostly English-only, covering web-use or Windows, Linux, and Android environments, but not macOS.

PCWorld highlights how old USB drives can be transformed into powerful PC rescue kits using portable applications that run without installation. Essential tools include bootable OS creators like Rufus and Ventoy, antivirus scanners like ClamWin and Stinger, and system repair utilities. These portable rescue kits enable tech support across multiple computers, offering hardware monitoring, network diagnostics, and Windows optimization capabilities. Portable apps are applications and tools that can be started directly upon clicking them, with no prior installation needed. The advantage of this is that the programs are immediately ready for use and can be started from any storage drive -- including a USB flash drive. These useful tools are then available for analyzing and maintaining any computer you slap the flash drive into, making them utterly invaluable for informal tech support duties. Let's take a look at the best portable applications for hardware analysis and system tuning, as well as a basic setup with media player, image editing, and word processing tools.