PCWorld outlines five essential Windows Defender configuration changes to optimize security and performance on new Windows PCs. Key adjustments include disabling redundant system tray icons, turning off unnecessary "no threats found" notifications, and enabling Controlled Folder Access for ransomware protection. Strategic exclusions for trusted files and adjusting Core Isolation settings can improve performance while maintaining robust built-in antivirus protection. Windows Defender is a capable antivirus solution built into Windows itself. Unless you've installed a different antivirus program on your Windows 11 or Windows 10 PC, your PC is using it right now.

Roughly 500 labour groups across the United States have organised a widespread economic blackout calling for "no school, no work, no shopping" to mark May Day, also known as International Workers' Day. The events, organised as part of an initiative called May Day Strong, were inspired by economic boycotts following ramped-up immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the deaths of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. May Day Strong has a broad set of demands, including "tax the rich" and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- a call that comes as Republicans voted on Wednesday on a budgetary measure that would fund the agency under the Department of Homeland Security. It also calls for ending war and "expanding democracy", according to a statement from the group. While the tent is broad in nature, organisers stressed that it is a result of a wide set of challenges facing the US worker.

Causal mediation analysis provides techniques for defining and estimating effects that may be endowed with mechanistic interpretations. With many scientific investigations seeking to address mechanistic questions, causal direct and indirect effects have garnered much attention. The natural direct and indirect effects, the most widely used among such causal mediation estimands, are limited in their practical utility due to stringent identification requirements. Accordingly, considerable effort has been invested in developing alternative direct and indirect effect decompositions with relaxed identification requirements. Such efforts often yield effect definitions with nuanced and challenging interpretations. By contrast, relatively limited attention has been paid to relaxing the identification assumptions of the natural direct and indirect effects. Motivated by a secondary aim of a recent non-randomized vaccine prospective cohort study (NCT05168813), we present a set of relaxed conditions under which the natural direct effect is identifiable in spite of unobserved baseline confounding of the exposure-mediator pathway; we use this result to investigate the effect mediated by putative immune correlates of protection. Relaxing the commonly used but restrictive cross-world counterfactual independence assumption, we discuss strategies for evaluating the natural direct effect in non-randomized settings that arise in the analysis of vaccine studies. We revisit prior studies of semi-parametric efficiency theory to demonstrate the construction of flexible, multiply robust estimators of the natural direct effect and discuss efficient estimation strategies that do not place restrictive modeling assumptions on nuisance functions.

From threat modeling to encrypted collaboration apps, we've collected experts' tips and tools for safely and effectively building a group--even while being targeted and tracked by the powerful. Rarely in modern US history have so many Americans opposed the actions of the federal government with so little hope for a top-down political solution. That's left millions of people seeking a bottom-up approach to resistance: grassroots organizing. Yet as Americans assemble their own movements to protect and support immigrants, push back against the Department of Homeland Security's dangerous incursions into cities, and protest for civil rights and policy changes, they face a federal government that possesses vast surveillance powers and sweeping cooperation from the Silicon Valley companies that hold Americans' data. That means political, social, and economic organizing presents a risky dilemma. How do you bring people of all ages, backgrounds, and technical abilities into a mass movement without exposing them to monitoring and targeting by a government--and in particular Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, agencies with paramilitary ambitions, a tendency to break the law, and more funding than some countries' militaries. Organizing safely in an age of surveillance increasingly requires not only technical security know-how, but also a tricky balance between secrecy and openness, says Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties.

Security experts have urged people to be cautious with the viral agentic AI tool, known for being highly capable but also wildly unpredictable. Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. "You've likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment, he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. "Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts." Grad isn't the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic AI tool, which was briefly known as MoltBot and is now named OpenClaw. A Meta executive says he recently told his team to keep OpenClaw off their regular work laptops or risk losing their jobs. The executive told reporters he believes the software is unpredictable and could lead to a privacy breach if used in otherwise secure environments. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

However,textgeneration models output tokens sequentially inalargeoutput space; theclassic PATE algorithm is not customized for this setting.