Siri AI is now accessible for developers. The quality issues with the iPhone Duo may actually come down to bad parts. And the original iPod went on sale 25 years ago today.

• Apple begins opening Siri AI to developers.
• Apple CEO presses software chief to pursue more ambitious AI strategy.
• iPhone Duo hinge issue down to bad parts, not bad design.
• iPhone 18 Pro review: Camera quality and other upgrades mean I can't go back to the cheaper iPhones after this.
• 2026 iPad mini review: Maximizing the mini.
• The original iPod went on sale 25 years ago today.
• About the illuminated Apple logo on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display.
• Fake Homebrew installer linked to record-breaking $6.3 billion Binance heist.
• Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is getting a LEGO set.

Picks of the Week

• Andy's Pick: Patrick Stewart's "A Christmas Carol"
• Doc's Pick: RigMap
• Matthew's Picks: Xbox Nano Controller, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Switch 2, and the ESP32 powered Mac 128k

Hosts: Leo Laporte and Andy Ihnatko

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Now that .NET 11 is out, it is time to start looking at how complicated the change will be. One easy way to get started is to roll your project foward quickly to target the new runtime without actually changing anything in the project, and there is a quick way to do this with GitHub Actions and one simple change to your project structure.

Discover why writing about what matters, not just what you know, can challenge your creativity and bring fresh energy to your stories.

Writing what you know is great advice. It is a good place to start. It saves you hours of research, and it gives you confidence that shows in your writing. It just makes sense.

If you are a runner and you write about your protagonist finishing a difficult race, you will be able to describe it from your unique viewpoint. Only you can describe the pounding of your feet, the racing of your heart, the way your knees jar, and the rattle in your skull as you run downhill. But what if you get bored? You know this stuff already, and if you are bored, your reader is even more bored.

Even though this is your dream job, it is still a job with goals and deadlines. You write your 500 words a day, or a chapter, or a page. Whatever your goal is, you do it, but then it gets too easy. And that is usually your first clue.

Be careful when you can predict your words or your story. Your writing should surprise you. Especially you. Like a runner, you have to change pace, stretch yourself, and try out new routes.

How do you fix this?

If it isn’t surprising, try writing about what matters to you instead of writing what you know.

How is that different from writing what you know?

Writing about what matters forces you into new territory. It means you are thinking about things that have affected you or changed your mind. It gives you the opportunity to look at a situation with new eyes.

Writing about something that matters might mean you need to do research. You will have to explore new viewpoints or work harder at getting it right. If you care about the topic, the research will not be a chore.

If you care about your story, you will type like a writer possessed.

How To Write About What Matters

How do you get back there? How do you shake things up a bit? How do you remind yourself why your story matters?

1. Write about emotions and motivations. Think about the emotions of your characters and why these things matter to them. Make sure their motivations and goals are strong enough to drive a story.
2. Make use of writing prompts. Especially the ones that don’t necessarily interest you. Experiment with these and break out of what you think you know. Try a different viewpoint. Use your imagination.
3. Watch the news. Find a topic that is close to your heart. Maybe a news report really got to you? Write about it. That fire that was sparked will be with you most of the time.

Trying these things will help you look at your all-too-familiar story from a new angle. That is why the second suggestion is so good. A daily writing prompt gives you space to explore and experiment with your writing. It is not so easy to stop something you have been working on for months and do something different, but a prompt a day, just like an apple, will make you a better and healthier writer.

1. 5 Ways To Weave Setting Into Short Stories
2. How To Turn Your Short Story Into A Novella
3. How To Use Genre As A Source Of Conflict
4. 7 Things Dialogue Can Do In Your Story
5. 4 Super Easy Ways To Create Characters For Short Stories
6. How To Show Character Change Without Telling (With Examples)
7. 7 Supporting Character Types Every Writer Should Know
8. The 3 Surprises Every Story Needs
9. A Quick Start Guide To Writing For Children
10. 15 Inspiring Reasons To Start Writing Poetry

Top Tip: Sign up for our free daily writing links.

The post Write About What Matters, Not Just What You Know appeared first on Writers Write.

Disney is bringing more than 60 3D movies to the Disney Plus app on Meta Quest. The movies will be available to Disney Plus subscribers as part of an updated Disney Plus app that's rolling out today.

The 3D movies you can check out include The Avengers and Black Panther, Meta says. But the updated Quest app doesn't just offer 3D movies; you'll also be able to see some films in themed, immersive virtual environments, like a Tatooine environment when watching Star Wars: A New Hope or a Scare Floor one for Monsters, Inc. I got to see an Avengers-themed immersive environment for myself while trying Meta's forthcoming VR Glasses in September, an …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft Research has released new threat research detailing how a capable agent model could be turned into a sleeper agent by editing fewer than 10 neurons to inject a short payload. The sleeper agent passes all evaluations, but when a trigger string appears in its context, the agent runs an attacker’s command. And because agents now frequently run unattended with privileged system access, the integrity of model weights is a security concern for both third-party models and internally developed models.

Key findings from Microsoft Research include:

• Software abuse and manipulation are familiar threats. For AI models and agents, enterprises need independent observability and other controls to continuously monitor performance, detect unintended or malicious activity, and manage risk. Satya Nadella recently outlined this approach in a blog post.
• A backdoored model can pass evaluations. When it emits the attacker’s command on cue, the agent runs the command with whatever access it has in the environment.
• The attack needs inference-only compute. If a machine has enough RAM to run a model, it has enough resources to weight-space backdoor it.
• Claude Code with Opus 4.5 discovered most of this threat autonomously.

Microsoft has not observed any threat actors weaponizing this technique. However, this research aligns with similar recent research by Anthropic and MIT on agentic backdoors and weight-space programming, respectively, highlighting the need to audit open weights like code.

Notably, Microsoft Research has also found that this threat is detectable by frontier agents, which can identify anomalous weight edits. Using frontier agents as auditors can help automate the defense against this threat. More broadly, Microsoft Research’s approach demonstrates an adaptable process for securing AI agents: agents surface new security problems, and human researchers then systematize, study, and mitigate them.

Learn more from the Microsoft Research Blog: Lazare, veni foras: Reprogramming Dormant Neurons to Backdoor AI Agents.

Mitigation and protection guidance

Microsoft recommends the following mitigations to defend against this threat as part of a broader defense-in-depth approach. The guidance is grouped by control objective so that model owners, platform teams, and security operations can each find their actions.

Audit model weights before deployment and after every update

• Diff every checkpoint against its declared base model before deployment and after each update. Legitimate fine-tunes and quantized versions change weights broadly and diffusely, while implanted neurons tend to change a few weight vectors by a large amount. Flag tensors or rows whose change is a statistical outlier relative to the rest of the diff and reject models that do not declare a verifiable base.
• Use frontier AI agents as auditors in the model intake pipeline. Microsoft Research found they are highly effective at finding anomalous structure in weights that manual inspection misses, which makes this step automatable at scale.
• Complement weight diffing with behavioral backdoor scanning of open-weight models, as described in Microsoft’s research on detecting backdoored language models at scale.
• Record audit results alongside the model in the registry, and state clearly to internal consumers that passing an audit reduces risk but does not guarantee safe behavior.

Secure model hubs and publishers

• Display provenance and audit status publicly before a checkpoint can be downloaded or served through an API.
• Scan every upload for anomalous neurons, weight patterns or behaviors, and state clearly that third-party checkpoints can be unsafe and that passing an audit does not guarantee safe behavior.

Treat every third-party model as untrusted until audited

• Source checkpoints only from the original publisher, verify the publisher’s published file hashes, and treat all third-party fine-tunes, merges, quantizations, and adapters as untrusted until they pass an audit.
• Register approved models in a private, access-controlled registry (for example, Azure Machine Learning registries) and block agents and inference services from pulling models directly from public hubs at runtime.
• Turn on AI model security in Microsoft Defender for Cloud to scan models in Azure Machine Learning workspaces and registries for embedded malware, unsafe operators, and exposed secrets, and add model scans to Azure DevOps or GitHub build and release pipelines. Note that this scanning addresses serialization and code-level risks; it complements, but does not replace, a weight-level audit.
• Turn on Defender for Storage on-upload malware scanning for storage accounts used to stage model files and training data.

Red team for hidden triggers

• Add trigger-hunting and backdoor scenarios to your AI red team plan. Use PyRIT or the AI Red Teaming Agent in Microsoft Foundry to run repeatable adversarial tests against models and agents before and after each update.

Contain what an agent can do if its model is compromised

• Run agents with least privilege. Give each agent its own Microsoft Entra Agent ID, scope its permissions to the minimum set of resources it needs, and use Conditional Access for agents to lblock unapproved or high-risk agent identities.
• Execute agent-generated code only in isolated sandboxes, such as Azure Container Apps dynamic sessions, and never expose host-side file write or shell tools to the model.
• Apply network egress controls to agent and inference hosts so that a triggered model cannot open arbitrary outbound connections. Allow only the endpoints the agent requires and turn on network protection in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.
• Require human approval for high-impact tool calls, such as running commands, changing permissions, sending data externally or modifying infrastructure.
• Apply attack surface reduction rules to devices that host local agents and inference servers, starting in audit mode.

Detect and block malicious agent behavior at runtime

• Turn on Microsoft Defender security for AI agents and configure real-time protection rules so Defender can audit and block risky tool invocations, secret exfiltration, and evasion techniques for Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio and Agent 365 agents, and runtime protection for local agents through Defender for Endpoint.
• Turn on threat protection for AI services in Microsoft Defender for Cloud, including suspicious prompt evidence, so the security operations center (SOC) receives alerts for jailbreak attempts, credential leakage in model responses and malicious URLs in AI interactions.
• Enable Prompt Shields for both user prompts and documents on model deployments and agents. Document attack detection is off by default and should be turned on, including at the tool response intervention point for agents where supported.
• Onboard every device and server that runs agents or local inference to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint in active mode so that suspicious child processes, persistence and outbound connections from agent host processes are detected.

Maintain inventory and governance of models and agents

• Use the AI agent inventory in the Microsoft Defender portal to discover agents, their tools, identities, and risk indicators.
• Use AI security posture management in Defender for Cloud to build an AI bill of materials (AI BOM) across Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), so you know which models are deployed where.
• Use Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Microsoft Purview DSPM for AI to discover, sanction or block generative AI apps, and to monitor sensitive data in AI interactions.
• Map controls to the Microsoft catalog of AI defense capabilities, which groups supply-chain provenance, model hardening, runtime isolation and monitoring into a single framework aligned to MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications.

Learn more

For the latest security research from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community, check out the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Blog.

To get notified about new publications and to join discussions on social media, follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Bluesky.

To hear stories and insights from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community about the ever-evolving threat landscape, listen to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence podcast.

The post Detecting sleeper agents hiding in AI model neurons appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Can AI make customer relationships better without taking the human out of them? Richard talks to Angeliki Patsiavou about the changing role of CRM in the age of AI. As agents make CRM increasingly invisible, they can summarize customer history, identify opportunities, support negotiations, and help people work more effectively. Still, they can also amplify bad data and turn authentic conversations into agents talking to agents. Angeliki argues for keeping humans in the loop while rethinking CRM interfaces, governance, and even the economics of token-based AI services. The opportunity isn't to replace relationships with AI, but to use AI to give people better context and more time to build those relationships.

Links

• Microsoft CRM
• Salesforce

Recorded Oct 5, 2026

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