QR codes are ubiquitous these days, as they are an easy way to deliver marketing content or direct users to websites and apps. They have also become a hiding place for malicious code. A threat research team at cybersecurity company Socket has discovered what it called “a sophisticated backdoor mechanism” that, when incorporated into an

GraalVM 25, an update to Oracle’s tool for compiling Java applications into native binaries, has arrived alongside the newly released JDK 25. The update enhances the precision of points-to analysis in Native Image and allows source-phase imports from WebAssembly modules. Oracle also revealed plans to detach GraalVM from the Java ecosystem train. Downloadable from graalvm.org,

When I started coding in the 1970s, I used BASIC. I remember discovering the cool new language feature called GOSUB that let you jump around easily in code and then return to where you had previously been. What a revelation!   The language at the time had variables—but no constants. Parameters were not a thing—we had GOSUB!—and the

Reactive programming is an important coding style that evolved from the functional programming world. Reactive code is ideal for processing and connecting realtime streaming data. You can use reactive programming to compose streams into pipelines that cleanly model complex logic with non-blocking operations. Java has excellent reactive support, and one of the most popular reactive Java

There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.—Tim Peters, Zen of Python While that quote is excellent, Python doesn’t always adhere to it in principle. One area where Python has fallen short of the ideal is package management. For too long, managing Python projects involved a mishmash of tools and methodologies. However,

After more than a year of increasingly bitter relations, the one-time bromance between Microsoft and OpenAI is all over except for the shouting — the companies have agreed to a vague framework for their impending divorce.  Who got the better of the deal? To find out, we need to revisit the history of their partnership, then

Alibaba is taking direct aim at US tech giants with Qwen3-Omni, a new open-source AI model that processes text, images, audio, and video, and is freely available under the enterprise-friendly Apache 2.0 license. The release positions Alibaba as a potential alternative to OpenAI and Google by offering enterprises a no-cost way to deploy multimodal AI

It is a universally acknowledged truth that Apple has fallen behind in artificial intelligence, even though millions of its products can already run most cloud-based models as well as its own on-device AI, presently in the form of Apple Intelligence. Which is to say: never believe something until it becomes true. You see, despite the story, the

Windows 11 24H2 has been released, but behind the scenes, Microsoft is constantly working to improve the newest version of Windows. The company frequently rolls out public preview builds to members of its Windows Insider Program, allowing them to test out — and help shape — upcoming features. Skip to the latest builds The Windows

The United Nations has launched a call for countries to agree to what it refers to as AI red lines: “do-not-cross limits for artificial intelligence, by the end of 2026 to prevent the most severe risks to humanity and global stability.”  The UN statement issued Monday said, “without binding international rules, humanity