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Conan O’Brien gets a golden Doom Hammer Image Credits:SXSW / YouTube Johanna Faries, president of Blizzard Entertainment, and Conan O’Brien nerded out over the world of gaming at SXSW on Tuesday. O’Brien, the iconic comedian, is a self-proclaimed “clueless gamer” who has been known to dabble (badly, by his own account) with World of Warcraft and Diablo. (Side note: O’Brien said he’d like to be “a demon, maybe a necromancer” in the next Diablo game.)  The two noted that SXSW’s inclusion of a gaming talk was overdue recognition of the importance of the industry, which is increasingly influencing even film…

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says that, despite the Trump administration’s attacks on globalism, global trade isn’t dead. In fact, he thinks that the U.S.’s key to growth will be embracing an international exchange of goods. “So, I actually am a firm believer — I think it goes all the way back to the economists who studied global trade in the 1800s — and I think their perspective was, every 10% increase in global trade leads to a 1% increase in local GDP,” Krishna said during an onstage interview at SXSW on Tuesday. “So, if we want to really optimize even…

Apple on Tuesday released iOS 18.3.2 and iPadOS 18.3.2 with an urgent fix for a WebKit flaw that’s already been exploited on older versions of the mobile operating system. The zero-day, tagged as CVE-2025-24201, allows attackers to break out of the Web Content sandbox and Cupertino warns that it “may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 17.2.” “This is a supplementary fix for an attack that was blocked in iOS 17.2,” the company said in a barebones bulletin. “For our customers’ protection, Apple doesn’t disclose, discuss, or confirm…

PARIS (AP) — Saint Laurent closed Paris Fashion Week in dramatic fashion Tuesday night, with the Eiffel Tower glowing against the night sky and a vast black onyx stage polished to a mirror-like sheen. Designer Anthony Vaccarello ’s fall collection refined the house’s codes into pure, striking silhouettes — where sharp tailoring and commanding shoulders set the tone. Models moved with quiet authority across the onyx stage, their looks defined by bold proportions, rich textures, and a stripped-back sense of power.“Chanel gave women freedom. Yves Saint Laurent gave them power.” The famous words of Saint Laurent’s partner Pierre Bergé, echoed…

For the second month in a row, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates landed with warnings that a half-dozen Windows security defects have already been exploited in the wild. Redmond’s security response team slapped “exploitation detected” tags on six of the 57 security vulnerabilities patched this month and pushed Windows admins to prioritize another large batch of code execution flaws. The latest exploited zero-days were addressed in the  Microsoft Management Console, Windows NTFS, the Fast FAT File System Driver, and the Win32 Kernel Subsystem. According to Microsoft documentation, the exploited bugs allow security features bypass, remote code execution, privilege escalate via memory…

Flower Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Tuesday launched a preview of its distributed cloud platform for serving AI models, called Flower Intelligence. Mozilla is already using it to power the upcoming Assist summarization add-on for its Thunderbird email client. What makes Flower Intelligence unique, Flower Labs said in a post on X, is that it can drive on-device AI mobile, PC, and web apps that automatically hand off to a private cloud when needed (with a user’s permission). Apps default to an AI model running locally for speed and privacy but switch to Flower’s cloud when they require extra…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department plans to lay off over 1,300 of its employees as part of an effort to halve the organization’s staff — a prelude to President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the agency.Department officials announced the cuts Tuesday, raising questions about the agency’s ability to continue usual operations.The Trump administration had already been whittling the agency’s staff, though buyout offers and the termination of probationary employees. After Tuesday’s layoffs, the Education Department’s staff will sit at roughly half of its previous 4,100, the agency said.The layoffs are part of a dramatic downsizing directed by Trump as…

The intersection of robotics and AI continues to attract attention from investors and Big Tech alike. The latest indicator? Dexterity, a startup specializing in industrial robots with “human-like” finesse, has raised $95 million at a post-money valuation of $1.65 billion, per Bloomberg. The investment, which includes backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sumitomo Corp., highlights the growing demand for machinery powered by AI and comes amid a wave of excitement from companies like Meta and Apple, which are reportedly exploring investments into AI-powered humanoid robots, and startups like humanoid robot makers Figure AI and Apptronik that have recently secured enormous…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is canceling studies about ways to improve vaccine trust and access, a move that comes in the midst of a large measles outbreak fueled by unvaccinated children.Researchers with grants from the National Institutes of Health to study why some people have questions or fears about vaccines and how to help those who want to be vaccinated overcome barriers are getting letters canceling their projects.The step — first reported by The Washington Post, which cited dozens of expected cancellations — is highly unusual, as entire swaths of research typically aren’t ended mid-stream.“It is the policy…

Software maker Adobe on Tuesday released fixes for at least 35 security flaws in a wide range of products, including serious code-execution bugs in the widely deployed Acrobat and Reader applications. As part of its scheduled Patch Tuesday rollout, the San Jose, Calif. company called immediate attention to a high-severity bulletin documenting at least nine security defects in Adobe Acrobat and Reader for Windows and macOS. The company flagged multiple critical-severity issues and warned that successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code execution and memory leaks. Adobe is also pushing users to prioritize an available security update for Adobe InDesign,…