While in thesepost-CrowdStrike daysit is reasonable to think one of the best ways to improve endpoint security in any business is toreplace Windows with Apple devices, thats just the starting point in a serious security journey.But its a pretty good starting point.Writing onLinkedIn, Google CISO Phil Venables recently drew attention to his companys latest cybersecurity report, which quite clearly makes a strong case for the need to purchase products that like Apples aresecure by design.If you want security, start with securityThereport explains:Organizations dont need more security products; they need more secure products.Thats one of the key takeaways from our new global cyber security survey. The research reveals that incremental security fixes no longer work. In fact, the more security tools an organization throws at the problem, the worse it gets.Supporting that argument, theres data:Organizations with 10 or more security tools endure 14 security incidents each year.Those with 10 or fewer such tools have to weather just six such events.82% of security decision-makers acknowledge the need to improve security measures.More than half admit that the complexity of modern work environments hinders their efforts.59% say reliance on outdated technology leaves them ill-equipped to handle future security needs.In other words, one way to halve the number of security incidents your company is exposed to is to rationalize spending on security tools, ensure those tools are effective in protecting the entire attack surface of company operations, and invest in computers, smartphones, and tablets that are secure by design.Such as those from Apple (and maybe even those from Google).Away with the cloudsYou might also considerrecent datathat suggests Google Cloud and AWS are more secure than Microsoft Azure and consider the value of your data as AI heads into the server farms and wraps itself around the globe. (I cant help but thinkApples Private Cloud Computecould eventually be a competitor in this space, too.)Most enterprise decision makers have heard all these arguments before.Facing rapid change, new technology deployments, and multiple waves of digital transformation, they arent just time poor, but budget-constrained. In those environments (which is most environments) it feels like the best decision is to continue managing more of the same.That means patching together mish-mash networks of systems and solutions and constant investment in teams to manage it all (and the ongoing costs of internal tech support for when those ad hoc systems inevitably go wrong).But on an increasingly unstable globe, we arent in Kansas anymore.The digital frontier is just as important a permiter as any geographical one, and the rising prevalence of nation state-backed attacks from all sides represent this. Business, every business, is now as compelling a target as any government entity in this brave new digi-world. And complacency will have (and is already having) huge impacts worldwide.Protecting your healthThe UKs National Health Service is afrequent victim of ransomware, for example. In part, this is because it remains heavily reliant onclapped out vintage computing equipmentdue to decades of ideologically inspired attacks against the integrity of the service.The truth is that UK infrastructure is pretty much a poster child for how to manage your digital platforms wrong.Complacency is a big part of that, with the nations National Cyber Security Center head, Richard Horne,about to warnthat the UK is unprepared for thelooming cyberwar(which some argue has already begun). Years of under-investment, a laissez-faire approach to security, and continued insistence on using legacy technologies have left the nations digital underbelly exposed.There is no room for complacency about the severity of state-led threats or the volume of the threat posed by cybercriminals,Horne plans to say. The defense and resilience of critical infrastructure, supply chains, the public sector and our wider economy must improve.Cyber-physician, heal thyselfWhile recommending a root-and-branch Mac migration might well seem to be an overly simplified diagnosis to the problem, it is a good starting point. After all, when did you last hear of a security incident impacting Apples systems puttingglobal business out of action?Never? Why is that?Because Apples products are secure by design.Thats not to say they are perfect.You must still put security policies and procedures in place, deploy secure endpoint management solutions, and ensure employees are fully up to speed with good security practices.Just because Macs havent fallen victim to a Windows-level cyberattack yet doesnt mean they never will, so you still need to have action plans prepared and rehearsed to go into effect on the day they inevitably do. But protecting your business by making such a migration is going to make a lot more sense as the cyberwars intensify.You need more secure platformsEven in the UK, IBM estimates the average cost of a data breach on UK businesses as $3.4 million, and while that does depend on the size of your enterprise, thats the kind of money that makes the seemingly higher one-off investment in a new platform seem aminor in contrast to the consequences of leaving yourselves vulnerable to attack through reliance on patched together solutions with so many built-in security weaknesses your top tech teams struggle to protect them.You dont need more security products. You need more secure platforms.Thats the bottom line.You can follow me on social media! Join me onBlueSky, LinkedIn,Mastodon, andMeWe.

A startup called Exa is pitching a new spin on generative search. It uses the tech behind large language models to return lists of results that it claims are more on point than those from its rivals, including Google and OpenAI. The aim is to turn the internets chaotic tangle of web pages into a kind of directory, with results that are specific and precise.Exa already provides its search engine as a back-end service to companies that want to build their own applications on top of it. Today it is launching the first consumer version of that search engine, called Websets.The web is a collection of data, but its a mess, says Exa cofounder and CEO Will Bryk. Theres a Joe Rogan video over here, an Atlantic article over there. Theres no organization. But the dream is for the web to feel like a database.Websets is aimed at power users who need to look for things that other search engines arent great at finding, such as types of people or companies. Ask it for startups making futuristic hardware and you get a list of specific companies hundreds long rather than hit-or-miss links to web pages that mention those terms. Google cant do that, says Bryk: Theres a lot of valuable use cases for investors or recruiters or really anyone who wants any sort of data set from the web.Things have moved fast since MIT Technology Review broke the news in 2021 that Google researchers were exploring the use of large language models in a new kind of search engine. The idea soon attracted fierce critics. But tech companies took little notice. Three years on, giants like Google and Microsoft jostle with a raft of buzzy newcomers like Perplexity and OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT Search in October, for a piece of this hot new trend.Exa isnt (yet) trying to out-do any of those companies. Instead, its proposing something new. Most other search firms wrap large language models around existing search engines, using the models to analyze a users query and then summarize the results. But the search engines themselves havent changed much. Perplexity still directs its queries to Google Search or Bing, for example. Think of todays AI search engines as a sandwich with fresh bread but stale filling.More than keywordsExa provides users with familiar lists of links but uses the tech behind large language models to reinvent how search itself is done. Heres the basic idea: Google works by crawling the web and building a vast index of keywords that then get matched to users queries. Exa crawls the web and encodes the contents of web pages into a format known as embeddings, which can be processed by large language models.Embeddings turn words into numbers in such a way that words with similar meanings become numbers with similar values. In effect, this lets Exa capture the meaning of text on web pages, not just the keywords.A screenshot of Websets showing results for the search: companies; startups; US-based; healthcare focus; technical co-founderLarge language models use embeddings to predict the next words in a sentence. Exas search engine predicts the next link. Type startups making futuristic hardware and the model will come up with (real) links that might follow that phrase.Exas approach comes at cost, however. Encoding pages rather than indexing keywords is slow and expensive. Exa has encoded some billion web pages, says Bryk. Thats tiny next to Google, which has indexed around a trillion. But Bryk doesnt see this as a problem: You dont have to embed the whole web to be useful, he says. (Fun fact: exa means a 1 followed by 18 0s and googol means a 1 followed by 100 0s.)Websets is very slow at returning results. A search can sometimes take several minutes. But Bryk claims its worth it. A lot of our customers started to ask for, like, thousands of results, or tens of thousands, he says. And they were okay with going to get a cup of coffee and coming back to a huge list.I find Exa most useful when I dont know exactly what Im looking for, says Andrew Gao, a computer science student at Stanford Univesrsity who has used the search engine. For instance, the query an interesting blog post on LLMs in finance works better on Exa than Perplexity. But theyre good at different things, he says: I use both for different purposes.I think embeddings are a great way to represent entities like real-world people, places, and things, says Mike Tung, CEO of Diffbot, a company using knowledge graphs to build yet another kind of search engine. But he notes that you lose a lot of information if you try to embed whole sentences or pages of text: Representing War and Peace as a single embedding would lose nearly all of the specific events that happened in that story, leaving just a general sense of its genre and period.Bryk acknowledges that Exa is a work in progress. He points to other limitations, too. Exa is not as good as rival search engines if you just want to look up a single piece of information, such as the name of Taylor Swifts boyfriend or who Will Bryk is: Itll give a lot of Polish-sounding people, because my last name is Polish and embeddings are bad at matching exact keywords, he says.For now Exa gets around this by throwing keywords back into the mix when theyre needed. But Bryk is bullish: Were covering up the gaps in the embedding method until the embedding method gets so good that we dont need to cover up the gaps.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Nominate someone to our 2025 list of Innovators Under 35Every year, MIT Technology Review recognizes 35 young innovators who are doing pioneering work across a range of technical fields including biotechnology, materials science, artificial intelligence, computing, and more.Previous winners include Lisu Su, now CEO of AMD, Andrew Ng, a computer scientist and serial entrepreneur, Jack Dorsey (two years after he launched Twitter), and Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot.Were now taking nominations for our 2025 list and you can submit one here. The process takes just a few minutes. Nominations will close at 11:59 PM ET on January 20, 2025. You can nominate yourself or someone you know, based anywhere in the world. The only rule is that the nominee must be under the age of 35 on October 1, 2025. Read more about what were looking for here.How US AI policy might change under TrumpPresident Biden first witnessed the capabilities of ChatGPT in 2022 during a demo from Arati Prabhakar, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in the oval office.That demo set a slew of events into motion, and encouraged President Biden to support the USs AI sector, while managing the safety risks that will come from it.However, that approach could change under Trump. Our AI reporter James ODonnell sat down with Prabhakar earlier this month to discuss what might be next. Read the full story.This story is from Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Whats next for Intel?Its CEO has been given the boot, and his replacement will be tasked with turning things around. (WSJ $)+ The departed Pat Gelsinger was firmly opposed to breaking the firm up. (Bloomberg $)+ Five years ago, Intel was on top of the world. What happened? (FT $)2 China has hit back at the latest US chip export restrictionsBy banning shipments of critical chip minerals to America. (FT $)+ Beijing accused the US of hindering normal trade exchanges. (The Guardian)+ Whats next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)3 Hackers are using AI to mine troves of personal dataThe new tools make it much easier to weaponize sensitive information. (WP $)+ The US government is trying to crack down on the sale of civilians personal data. (404 Media)+ Five ways criminals are using AI. (MIT Technology Review)4 Elon Musk has been denied a $56 million pay package for a second timeStill, hes not exactly short of a few bob. (The Verge)5 A network of women were duped into donating eggs to a disgraced billionaireThe US fertility industrys loose regulations have left the system open to abuse. (Bloomberg $)+ Conservative politicians are spreading anti-contraceptive disinformation. (New Yorker $)+ I took an international trip with my frozen eggs to learn about the fertility industry. (MIT Technology Review)6 An AI agent could do your next Black Friday shop for youIt could spell an end to tedious price-checking and bargain monitoring. (TechCrunch)+ What are AI agents? (MIT Technology Review)7 A new fleet of US nuclear reactors is on the horizonSimilar major pushes have failed in the past. Will this time be different? (The Atlantic $)+ Why the lifetime of nuclear plants is getting longer. (MIT Technology Review)8 It turns out that fish have a brain microbiomeIt raises the question whether humans could have one too. (Quanta Magazine)+ The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush. (MIT Technology Review)9 Why ChatGPT has become an emotional crutch for so many peopleBut beware using it to offload emotional labor. Its only a chatbot, after all. (The Guardian)+ The name David Mayer causes ChatGPT to melt down, for some reason. (TechCrunch)+ Heres how people are actually using AI. (MIT Technology Review)10 This Indigenous community may become Canadas first climate refugeesThe Western Arctic regions permafrost is thawing, and the Inuvialuit will be forced to leave their homes. (NYT $)Quote of the dayIt was a tough situation when Pat showed up, and things look much worse now.Financial analysts from Bernstein warn investors that whoever takes over from departing Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has their work cut out for them, Insider reports.The big storyHow to measure all the worlds fresh waterDecember 2021The Congo River is the worlds second-largest river system after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and animals. The massive tropical rainforest sprawled across its middle helps regulate the entire Earths climate system, but the amount of water in it is something of a mystery.Scientists rely on monitoring stations to track the river, but what was once a network of some 400 stations has dwindled to just 15. Measuring water is key to helping people prepare for natural disasters and adapt to climate changeso researchers are increasingly filling data gaps using information gathered from space. Read the full story.Maria GallucciWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ If you love a good steak, heres where you can track down some of the best. + Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker reflects on something truly terrifying: the workplace.+ Happy birthday to the one and only Prince of Darkness!+ The bar of the HR Giger Museum in Switzerland looks exactly how youd expect it wouldcompletely mindblowing.

Apple is proud to celebrate Hysterical with the 2024 Apple Podcasts Award.

If you're an Apple Books user, the 2024 Year in Review is now available, which aggregates all of your reading data into a fun slideshow akin to Spotify Wrapped.Apple Books 20204 Year in Review and collectionsIt's December, which means it's time for every app and service to take part in the social media hype of sharing year-in-reviews. Apple doesn't shy away from the trend, as it offers Apple Music Replay throughout the year and now the Apple Books review is available.It's quite simple to get your Apple Books Year in Review. Just open the app and tap the green icon that says "Year in Review" under the "Top Picks" category. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple has released a new firmware update for its Beats Solo Buds, though there are currently no details as to what the software update contains.Apple has released a firmware update for its Beats Solo Buds.Tuesday's firmware update increases the build number to 3A130, up from version 3A112, which originally shipped with the Beats Solo Buds. While Apple has not provided any release notes for the firmware, the update likely includes various bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements rather than new features.The Beats Solo Buds were originally announced in April 2024. They feature a custom acoustic architecture with nozzles and laser-cut vents made with ergonomics in mind. However, they notably lack the active noise cancelation found in products like the AirPods Pro 2. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The Warrnambool Learning and Library Centre, designed by Kosloff Architecture in Victoria, Australia, is a stunning example of civic architecture which uses sustainable materialshttps://www.e-architect.com/australia/warrnambool-learning-and-library-centre-australia#library #Architecture #australia #sustainablearchitectureThe Warrnambool Learning and Library Centre, designed by Kosloff Architecture in Victoria, Australia, is a stunning example of civic design

Perched on Hawaiis breathtaking coastline, OneOcean is a holiday home, designed by architects White Noise Design Studiohttps://www.e-architect.com/hawaii/one-ocean-holiday-house-hawaii#hawaii #coastline #holidayhome #architects #architecturePerched on Hawaiis breathtaking coastline, OneOcean is a holiday home, designed by architects White Noise Design Studio

CAN Architecture reimagined this Stoke Newington home into a light-filled, sustainable sanctuary. From the glulam structural frame to a custom curved glass window, every detail connects the home to its lush garden while adapting to the familys needs. https://bit.ly/49calAY#SustainableLiving #HomeDesign #Renovation Credit: Rick PushinskyFirst came the garden, then came the ground-floor renovation.

We're excited to share that Zonda's Elevate conference, taking place December 911, 2024, at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, will honor Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP Architects as "Architect of the Year" and Nick Prez of the Related Group as "Developer of the Year." This event brings together industry leaders to discuss the future of high-rise luxury living. Don't miss out! #Elevate2024 #Architecture #UrbanDevelopmenthttps://bit.ly/499WCedThe second annual luxury multifamily event will recognize Pasquarelli as Architect of the Year and Prez as Developer of the Year.