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Making the switch from the office to working from home has become the new normal, but some users might feel like their setup is not as well-appointed or productive as at the office. It's time to change that. With the proper equipment and gear, you can turn your boring-old home setup into a workstation powerhouse -- ensuring you'll never need to return to the office again. At PCWorld, we've had to adjust to remote work just like the rest of the world. Our staff has spent countless hours testing and reviewing hardware, which means we've been lucky enough to find the best gear and accessories available. Below you'll find our favorite work-from-home essentials.

One task where AI tools have proven to be particularly superhuman is analyzing vast troves of data to find patterns that humans can't see, or automating and accelerating the discovery of those we can. That makes Bitcoin's blockchain, a public record of nearly a billion transactions between pseudonymous addresses, the perfect sort of puzzle for AI to solve. Now, a new study--along with a vast, newly released trove of crypto crime training data--may be about to trigger a leap forward in automated tools' ability to suss out illicit money flows across the Bitcoin economy. On Wednesday, researchers from cryptocurrency tracing firm Elliptic, MIT, and IBM published a paper that lays out a new approach to finding money laundering on Bitcoin's blockchain. Rather than try to identify cryptocurrency wallets or clusters of addresses associated with criminal entities such as dark-web black markets, thieves, or scammers, the researchers collected patterns of bitcoin transactions that led from one of those known bad actors to a cryptocurrency exchange where dirty crypto might be cashed out.

I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even saw the answer. "The oozing cream, like time, escapes our grasp, / Each moment slipping with a silent gasp." I read the poem, Slacked part of it to a colleague, and closed the window.

Meta is revamping how Facebook recommends videos across Reels, Groups, and the main Facebook Feed, by using AI to power its video recommendation algorithm, Facebook head Tom Alison revealed on Wednesday. The world's largest social network has already switched Reels, its TikTok competitor, to the new engine, and plans to use it in all places within Facebook that show video -- the main Facebook feed and Groups -- as part of a "technology roadmap" through 2026, Alison said at a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco. Meta has made competing with TikTok a top priority ever since the app, which serves up vertical video clips and is known for its powerful recommendation engine that seems to know exactly what will keep users hooked, started exploding in popularity in the US in the last few years. When Facebook tested the new AI-powered recommendation engine with Reels, watch time went up by roughly 8 to 10 percent, Alison revealed. "So what that told us was this new model architecture is learning from the data much more efficiently than the previous generation," Alison said. "So that was like a good sign that says, OK, we're on the right track."

So that can have a number of effects. It can cause people to distrust the sources of information they are getting, to dissuade them or confuse them in terms of exercising their right to vote. To incite violence, certainly that's something that we are worried, about and to just generally sow distrust and potentially chaos.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are boosting online disinformation and enabling governments to increase censorship and surveillance in a growing threat to human rights, a U.S. nonprofit said in a report published Wednesday. Global internet freedom declined for the 13th consecutive year, with China, Myanmar and Iran having the worst conditions of the 70 countries surveyed by the Freedom on the Net report, which highlighted the risks posed by easy access to generative AI technology. AI allows governments to "enhance and refine online censorship" and amplify digital repression, making surveillance, and the creation and spread of disinformation faster, cheaper, and more effective, said the annual report by Freedom House.

The ongoing race to expand generative AI technology is reaching digital assistants -- one of many people's first introductions to an AI companion. Such is the case with Google, which is working on a revamp for its Assistant that will include generative AI-powered technology, according in an internal email obtained by Axios. Google Assistant's vice president Peeyush Ranjan and product director, Duke Dukellis, explained their rationale to staffers, stating: "As a team, we need to focus on delivering high-quality, critical product experiences for our users. We've also seen the profound potential of generative AI to transform people's lives and see a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest LLM technology, would look like." Notably, the email revealed that Google is already working on doing this for mobile devices.

If you've got an Amazon Echo speaker, you already know how much fun having Alexa at your fingertips can be despite the risk to your privacy and security. Whether playing music, answering random questions, or venting your frustrations, Alexa has become a part of your daily routine. Did you know, however, that it can do so much more? There are some seriously cool Alexa skills out there that can elevate your Echo speaker to a whole new level of intelligence. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER First, we have the "Ask My Buddy" skill, perfect for those who live alone or need assistance. With this skill, you can easily ask Alexa to notify a designated contact during an emergency, such as a fall or medical issue.

The capabilities of AI tools are progressing rapidly, with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and many others racing to stay ahead of the competition. It feels like advances and apps are arriving on a weekly basis, with the bar constantly being raised in terms of what AI can do for us. Auto-GPT is the latest evidence for this: It leverages the power of ChatGPT to create an autonomous AI assistant, capable of taking on tasks and projects on its own and working through multiple steps in a job without you having to prompt it every time. In other words, it does a lot of the hard work for you, without you having to come up with your own follow-up responses or ideas. Auto-GPT can be run locally on your computer. Think about everything you can do with ChatGPT, then imagine rolling that into a system that can supply its own feedback and make its own choices.