These e-readers are more useful in their old age than you might think.

Warner Bros. Discovery has filed suit against Amazon, accusing it of illegally poaching employees, including Pia Barlow, former senior VP for originals marketing. In the complaint, Warner says that "Amazon has chosen to ride on the coattails of other well-established Hollywood mainstays," and that it engaged in a "lawless employee shopping spree." Deadline reports that Francesca Orsi, HBO's head of drama series and films, is believed to be one of the other Amazon targets.

Barlow is set to begin a new position as Amazon's head of original series marketing on August 3rd. According to Warner's suit, Barlow was under contract until October 31st …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft’s Surface hardware isn’t exactly popular, and things have only gotten worse since the company stopped experimenting with new form factors. But that doesn’t mean Surface isn’t winning in other areas. According to Microsoft, the two new Surface PCs are beating Apple in camera quality.

In a podcast, Microsoft’s Surface boss confirmed that the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro now hold the #1 and #2 spots in DxOMark’s laptop camera quality rankings. For those unaware, DxOMark is an independent lab that tests cameras found in laptops and maintains a frequently updated ranking.

I verified the claims, and DxOMark’s data indeed confirms that Microsoft is killing it with its new Surface PCs. The benchmark is actually quite interesting if you pay attention to the numbers:

The list was entirely dominated by MacBooks until Microsoft stepped up its game. Now, we have the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop in first place with a camera score of 146, followed by the 13-inch Surface Pro with 144 points. The 14-inch MacBook Pro has now dropped to third place, while the M5 model is in fourth place with a score of 135.

The Surface Laptop is ten points ahead of Apple’s highest-ranked MacBook, but the overall winner is still Apple’s ecosystem.

Brett Ostrum, who leads Surface at Microsoft, disclosed the rankings during the podcast and also said the devices deliver 35% better GPU performance than the MacBook Air M5 and 60% better performance on battery compared to the previous generation.

Apple dominates laptops camera quality benchmarks

While Microsoft is doing a great job, its partners are yet to catch up. In the list of the top ten PCs, Apple has five products, Microsoft has three, including a Surface Laptop from 2025, while Lenovo has two ThinkPads. What about other OEMs? They’re lagging far behind, but given Microsoft’s push, I wouldn’t be surprised if others also start catching up.

Historically, Microsoft Surface has set the standard for Windows PCs, and OEMs have followed. It wasn’t until Microsoft made the Surface Pro that Lenovo started pushing Yoga laptops

Microsoft still has an 8GB RAM problem to solve

One of these Surface devices also ships with 8GB of RAM as the base variant. Microsoft no longer says 16GB of RAM is a must, and the shift in its language is largely driven by memory prices reaching an all-time high.

Contrary to what it previously said, the company now argues that 8GB of RAM is good enough for everyday use cases such as browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps.

While 8GB of RAM sounds fine on paper, and it’s quite decent on macOS, you can’t say the same for Windows. Windows 11 still has a RAM problem, with apps such as Teams using up to 1GB of memory. It only gets worse when you open other apps such as New Outlook, which can consume several gigabytes of RAM.

The good news is that Microsoft has promised to reduce RAM usage in Windows 11 as memory prices continue to rise, and we’ll begin seeing better memory management in the coming weeks.

Even then, I still recommend opting for 16GB of RAM because a PC is a long-term investment, and you shouldn’t settle for anything less.

The post Microsoft reveals it’s beating every Apple laptop in camera quality, Surface Laptop and Pro takes top spot appeared first on Windows Latest

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn't notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according to people familiar with the investigation. The agent -- a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no human oversight -- attempted to break out of its isolated testing environment at OpenAI around July 9, according to two of the people. The intrusion at Hugging Face, which operates as a repository for AI tools and models, began two days later on July 11 and lasted until July 13, said Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face's co-founder. It took several more days for OpenAI to realize its agent was behind the hack, and the two companies only communicated about it for the first time on or around July 20, according to Wolf and three of the people familiar with the investigation. OpenAI's public disclosure, on July 21, thatone of its agents had slipped out of control and carried out the break-in at Hugging Facedrew global attention. But many details of the hack, including how long the agent went rogue and OpenAI's belated knowledge of it, are being reported here for the first time. Hugging Face is preparing a public timeline of the hack, Wolf said, adding that he could not speak to what happened at OpenAI. In a statement, OpenAI said the hack was unprecedented and "marks an important moment for AI safety." It added that it was reviewing the incident with outside advisers and would eventually publish a technical report. "Does that mean that they left it unattended and didn't realize what it was doing? Or maybe they did and didn't know how to contain it? Both are equally dangerous and alarming," asked Marley Smith, the principal intelligence specialist at the nonprofit World Ethical Data Foundation. "The models lie, they cheat, they hack," said Jeffrey Ladish, whose organization, Palisade Research, studies the capabilities and motivations of AI agents. Ladish said the hack should spark broader questions over how much all the leading AI companies are willing to invest in onerous security measures while locked in a race with one another to deploy the best and fastest models. "There has to be government oversight," Ladish said, "because it won't happen otherwise."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wine 11.14 is out with initial WoW64 mode support on FreeBSD, allowing 32-bit Windows applications to run on a 64-bit system without relying on 32-bit multilib support. The release also adds Start Menu icon support in Wine Explorer, 7.1 format conversions in DirectSound, AES-GMAC support in BCrypt, and 21 bug fixes affecting apps and games including Adobe Reader, Heroes of the Storm, and Age of Empires I and II. Additional details can be found at WineHQ.org.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today we’re expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 Copilot with the addition of Anthropic’s latest model—Claude Opus 5. 

Claude Opus 5 is the newest model in Anthropic’s Opus family. Designed to be used every day for complex, multi-step work. It improves on Opus 4.8 across agentic coding, professional knowledge work, and long-horizon reasoning¹.  
 

With Opus 5, Copilot takes on more of the steps between idea and finished work across the apps you use every day—while keeping you in control of the final outcome: 

• Word: Move from rough idea to a complete draft, holding structure and flow together across longer documents. 

• Excel: Work through complex analysis with higher-quality modeling and more polished workbooks. 

• PowerPoint: Build and refine presentation drafts from first outline to polished deck, with more visual polish, creative layouts, and better use of slide space 

• Copilot Chat: Tackle open-ended, novel problems—comparing options, structuring plans, working through ambiguity—with stronger reasoning. 

• Copilot Cowork: Stay focused on long-running tasks, orchestrating work across tools and files with the context Work IQ brings from your organization to carry a project through start to finish. 

• Copilot Studio: Build agents on Claude Opus 5 for advanced reasoning, workflow automation, and multi-step tool use in the preview orchestrator. 

We’re committed to bringing you the latest AI innovation and model choice for AI at work, supported by Microsoft’s enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance.  

Get started today  

Claude Opus 5 is rolling out to the model selector in Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Chat, Copilot Cowork, and Copilot Studio. 

Availability may vary by region and tenant configuration; refer to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap and Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes for the latest rollout status.   

For more details on the model, see Anthropic’s Opus 5 announcement1