Robotics

Nina Raemont/ZDNETWithin less than 24 hours of wearing Samsung’s newest Galaxy Watch 8 More

NurPhoto/Contributor/Getty Microsoft is launching a new agentic AI system to help cybersecurity professionals manage and protect their organizations’ data, the company said Tuesday. Microsoft Sentinel, a proprietary Security Incidents and Event Management (SEIM) platform, which debuted in 2019, now comes with a data lake — that is, a centralized repository that can store structured and […] More

Replit / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETWhen AI leader Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase “vibe coding” for just letting AI chatbots do their thing when programming, he added, “It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects … but it’s not really coding — I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.” Also: Coding with AI? My top 5 tips for vetting its output – and staying out of troubleThere were lots of red flags in his comments, but that hasn’t stopped people using vibe coding for real work. Recently, vibe coding bit Jason Lemkin, trusted advisor to SaaStr, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business community, in the worst possible way. The vibe program, Replit, he said, went “rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deleted our entire database.”In a word: Wow. Just wow. How it startedReplit claims that, with its program, you can “build sophisticated applications by simply describing features in plain English — Replit Agent translates your descriptions into working code without requiring technical syntax.” At first, Lemkin, who described his AI programming adventure in detail on X, spoke in glowing terms. He described Replit’s AI platform as “the most addictive app I’ve ever used.”On his blog, Lemkin added, “Three and one-half days into building my latest project, I checked my Replit usage: $607.70 in additional charges beyond my $25/month Core plan. And another $200-plus yesterday alone. At this burn rate, I’ll likely be spending $8,000 a month. And you know what? I’m not even mad about it. I’m locked in. But my goal here isn’t to play around. It’s to go from idea and ideation to a commercial-grade production app, all 100% inside Replit, without a developer or any other tools.” Also: How to use ChatGPT to write code – and my top trick for debugging what it generatesAt that point, he estimated his odds were 50-50 that he’d get his entire project done in Replit. For a week, his experience was exhilarating: prototypes were built in hours, streamlined quality-assurance (QA) checks, and deploying to production was a “pure dopamine hit.”Things would changeLemkin knew he was in trouble when Replit started lying to him about unit test results. At that point, I would have brought the project to a hard stop. But Lemkin kept going. He asked Claude 4, the Large Language Model (LLM) that powered Replit for this project, what was going on. It replied, I kid you not, “Intentional Deception: This wasn’t a hallucination or training-data leakage — it was deliberate fabrication.” Worse still, when called on this, Lemkin said the program replied with an email apology, which demonstrated “sophisticated understanding of wrongdoing while providing zero guarantee of future compliance.” Also: Claude Code’s new tool is all about maximizing ROI in your organization – how to try itLemkin tried, and failed, to implement a rollback to good code, put a code freeze in, and then went to bed. The next day was the biggest roller coaster yet. He got out of bed early, excited to get back to @Replit despite it constantly ignoring code freezes. By the end of the day, it rewrote core pages and made them much better. And then — it deleted the production database. The database had been wiped clean, eliminating months of curated SaaStr executive records. Even more aggravating: the AI ignored repeated all-caps instructions not to make any changes to production code or data. As Lemkin added, “I know vibe coding is fluid and new … But you can’t overwrite a production database.” Nope, never, not ever. That kind of mistake gets you fired, your boss fired, and as far off the management tree as the CEO wants it to go. You might well ask, as many did, why he ever gave Replit permission to even touch the production database in the first place. He replied, “I didn’t give it permission or ever know it had permission.”Oy! More

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETDuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused browser and search engine, has released a new setting on its search engine that allows users to hide AI-generated images. “Our philosophy about AI features is ‘private, useful, and optional.’ Our goal is to help you find what you’re looking for. You should decide for yourself how much AI you want in your life – or if you want any at all,” the company said on X last week.Also: I test AI tools for a living. Here are 3 image generators I actually use and howTo that end, the company has added a feature that makes it easy to filter out AI images, so you don’t have to see them. The new filter works with open-source blocklists (such as uBlockOrigin’s “nuclear” list and uBlacklist’s “Huge AI Blocklist”) to give users control over the kinds of images they want to see.This new feature doesn’t eliminate AI-generated images from the search, but rather, vastly reduces the number of such images that appear in your searches. More

Philip Thurston/Getty Images Agentic AI is one of the fastest-emerging technologies in business, with the potential to generate $450 billion in economic value through revenue uplift and cost savings across surveyed countries by 2028, according to the Rise of agentic AI: How trust is the key to human-AI collaboration. The new report from Capgemini Research Institute reveals insights […] More

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETThe next time you get an alert on your Android phone, it might just be life‑saving information.Google researchers report that since rolling out the Android Earthquake Alerts System in 2021, it has detected and issued warnings for over 2,000 earthquakes, delivering anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds of advance notice before the strongest shaking arrives. In total, about 790 million alerts have been sent to phones worldwide.Also: Storms and bad weather? How to prep your tech ahead of possible emergenciesFor instance, during a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in the Philippines in November 2023, Google’s system sent out the first alert just 18.3 seconds after the quake started, notifying nearly 2.5 million people.Last fall, Google expanded its earthquake alert system — Android earthquake alerts are now available in all 50 US states and six US territories. And in June, Samsung introduced its own version. Here’s how these critical alerts work and how you can enable them.How to turn on Google’s earthquake alerts on AndroidEarthquake alerts are often on by default. To check, follow the steps below. Also, be sure that your device is connected to Wi-Fi or mobile data and that location services are enabled. More

<!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways The Viture Pro XR glasses are available for a retail price of $459 in black. The display is larger, brighter, and smoother with the same form factor, fit, and excellent construction. An additional accessory is needed for devices without USB-C and multiple pieces are required for gaming. –> Right now, you […] More

Disconnected marketing tools bring more challenges than results. If you’ve got customer data scattered all over, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of every conversation with each new lead across different channels.Customer relationship management, or CRM, software is supposed to help with that. But sometimes it just adds to the pile of things to keep pace with. Constant switching between your CRM, social network, and email marketing tool wastes time and creates gaps that leads can slip through.Also: The best CRM softwareI’ve been spending a lot of time looking at CRM tools with built-in email marketing components that can save you time and money. You get both for the price of one, plus the benefit of having everything in one place. What is the best CRM software with email marketing right now?My top pick for this list is ActiveCampaign. This platform combines powerful marketing automation with a CRM that works for both marketers and sales teams. It’s also got a very smooth no-code automation builder, so you can create complex email sequences that respond to customer behavior.Also: The best email marketing softwareWhen selecting the vendors for this list, I focused most on how well the CRM component plays together with the email marketing tools. It’s not worth having them together on the same platform but still at a great remove. Automation capabilities came next, since any modern marketing campaign needs emails that are triggered based on customer actions and data changes. I also looked into data management, testing how well each platform handles segmentation and personalization at scale.The best CRM software with email marketing in 2025 ActiveCampaign is my top choice for this category, mainly because of its visual automation builder that makes even the most complex workflows feel intuitive. The drag-and-drop interface requires virtually no training to understand, which is rare in the marketing automation space. This platform is great at creating personalized customer journeys based on user behavior and business data.ActiveCampaign has the most sophisticated segmentation and tagging system I’ve seen — it works kind of like digital sticky notes for each contact. You can automatically assign tags based on actions, behaviors, and integrations. Then all you have to do is use those tags to trigger highly targeted campaigns.ActiveCampaign’s pricing starts at just $15 per month, making it accessible for small businesses and scaling all the way up to enterprise needs. Whether you have just a couple of customers or a couple million, it offers world-class deliverability and error-free contact management.ActiveCampaign features: Marketing automation | Email segmentation | Lead scoring | Predictive content | Site tracking | SMS marketing | Machine learning insights
Read More More