Jacob Wendt composes, arranges, and leads his own music while resisting the urge to make every track about the drummer. His new album, The Gallery, was recorded by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Records (aka. Hackensack West) and becomes the fourth release from Cohearent Records when it arrives in late summer.

In this episode of the eCoustics Podcast, Eric Pye (@audioloveyyc) and Mitch Anderson (@black_circle_radio) speak with Wendt and Gray about The Gallery, Wendt’s earlier album Silver Street, ensemble chemistry, getting the horns right, analog recording, and promoting independent jazz.

Sponsor: Thank you to our podcast sponsor SVS.

This episode was recorded on July 16, 2026.

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security

Turns out decades-old email tricks still work against some LLM-powered email filters

Notice more spam getting through that corporate email filter lately? Attackers are using a technique known as “text salting,” which hides benign-looking words intended to confuse some AI-powered email filters, says cybersecurity firm Barracuda.

The email security outfit said on Thursday that it had detected more than one million retail-themed phishing attacks using text salting since April. It’s not a new technique by any stretch and has been used to fool traditional secure email gateways for years, but Barracuda says it can also confuse machine-learning and LLM-based security tools.

Text salting involves peppering (sorry) a malicious email with random, harmless-seeming words in order to fool an email scanning system into thinking there’s nothing off about the flavor of a message (sorry again), tricking the system into passing it to its recipient for consumption (I’ll stop with the food jokes here). 

Pour a pile of salty text on top of an email and a human reader would probably get suspicious, however, so attackers typically use one or more of three flavor variations (okay, I’m done – promise) to hide the additives from human readers, but not automated scanners, per Barracuda.

Typical techniques include CSS cropping, which sets the visible window small enough that a human won’t see the hidden filler text; text manipulation to move the salty copy outside the visible screen; and zero font techniques which insert misleading words between suspicious phishing copy that’s visible to a machine but not a human. 

The end result of each of those techniques is a message that reads less malicious, more gibberish to a machine, leading it to assume the email is fine, and which looks exactly as the attacker intended when viewed by a human. 

Modern email security systems have largely adapted to these techniques, with newer tools able to remove hidden text to see what a reader is supposed to see, sounding alarms when a lot of hidden stuff is inserted in an email, and the like. AI, however, hasn’t managed to follow suit, says Barracuda. 

“Text salting and related techniques can be used to confuse AI-driven content analysis engines by flooding the email with random terms that encourage the AI system into making an incorrect classification decision,” the company wrote in its report – just like those early 2000s SEGs. What a technological leap we’ve made!

LLMs, Barracuda explained, are typically designed to process email text and source code plainly, with no understanding of whether text is visible or hidden from a user. They can be trained to do so, but that just means most tools probably aren’t doing that by default. 

So, what can enterprises do to stop the flow of salty spam to their employees? Barracuda recommends a layered approach to email security rather than relying solely on keyword detection, including checking sender reputation, authentication results, embedded URLs, HTML-rendering techniques, and differences between user-visible and hidden content.

Ditching that AI spam filter might not be a bad idea, either. ®

off-prem

Amazon asks users not to panic as it works to fix the bug

Your AWS billing estimate might look just a little inflated right now. If you woke up to find an email from Amazon Web Services this morning telling you that you’d gone over your billing threshold by a few hundred million dollars, don’t panic: Something’s gone wrong in the AWS Billing Console, the company admitted. 

An open issue on the AWS Health Dashboard (archived copy at the time of writing) popped up at 1:33 am Pacific time on Friday informing users that Cost Explorer was “reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data.” As of writing, the issue is still unresolved despite AWS trying several different things to get it fixed.

The company apparently identified the root cause within an hour and a half of beginning its investigation, only describing it as “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem.” 

AWS followed up by pausing estimated bill updates, saying customers would continue to see the inflated figures already displayed, but that those estimates would not increase further.

“The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges,” AWS explained, noting that customers don’t need to take any action, like, we imagine, flooding the help portal with tickets telling them what they already know, for instance. 

“Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data,” AWS added. 

After we first published this article, Amazon updated the issue page to indicate that it had identified the root cause and mitigated the underlying issue. The company says that it’s begun backfilling data in the Cost Management Console to correct billing numbers, and that all customers should see corrected amounts by Saturday, July 18 at noon pacific time.

We owe HOW much?

Users took to Reddit and Hacker News this morning to report they’d received overage emails for massive amounts – we weren’t exaggerating with that hundreds of millions opening line. If anything, it was an understatement.

Screenshots posted in the Reddit thread showed one user whose AWS charges totaled just $0.19 last month receiving an estimated bill of nearly $2.5 billion. Others in the thread claimed to have received estimated monthly charges ranging from $126,000 to as much as $2.5 trillion. Hacker News users similarly reported estimates in the billions.

Amazon said the figures shown in customers’ accounts were inaccurate estimates rather than actual charges. As for when users might see their billing portal reflect an accurate number, that could take a while. 

AWS declined to explain the issue aside from pointing us to the dashboard page linked above. We’ll be keeping an eye on this developing story and update it as we learn more. ®

Updated at 1903 to show that Amazon has updated its issue page with a resolution.

Forrester’s research measures several countries’ ability to develop, operate and secure critical technologies independently of foreign governments’ influence.

Forrester has published the findings of its new ‘Global Sovereignty Forecast, 2025 to 2030’ report, which takes a look at how AI and technology sovereignty is likely to evolve across 14 major global economies between now and 2030. 

The study measured countries’ ability to develop, operate and secure critical technologies independently of foreign governments’ influence.

What was discovered is that despite significant investment in sovereign AI, chip manufacturing, cloud infrastructure and national technology capabilities, it is projected that global tech sovereignty will advance slowly over the next few years, with China and the US maintaining a lead position. 

The average tech sovereignty score across all 14 countries assessed – which were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, the UK and the US – predicts only a minimal rise from 39pc in 2025 to 40pc in 2030. 

Each country was analysed across nine dimensions of technology sovereignty: government AI investment; cloud sovereignty; technology workforce availability; AI model development; data centre capacity relative to technology spending; data centre autonomy; semiconductor production; software creation; and rare earths processing.  

With China and the US recording the highest overall tech sovereignty scores at 82pc and 79pc respectively, the report suggests that tech sovereignty will remain concentrated among a small number of geopolitical and economic powers. If other regions are serious about closing capability gaps and reducing tech dependencies, they will need to commit to strategic partnerships and alliances.

Key highlights

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the recent worldwide focus, across all technology dimensions, semiconductor manufacturing was found to have the strongest projected improvement. The US’s and South Korea’s chip production scores are set to increase from 45pc in 2025 to 79pc in 2030. Meanwhile, Japan is expected to jump from 36pc to 53pc, China from 40pc to 51pc and India from 0pc to 13pc. 

However, the report also noted that even amid the improvements, semiconductors and software will remain among the most significant sovereignty challenges due to concentrated chip supply chains and a handful of dominant software providers.

Sovereignty was also divided in terms of which country in North America you belong to. While the US is forecast to remain a global leader, Canada is expected to improve modestly, going from 33pc to 34pc. Mexico will continue to remain the lowest among the 14 countries assessed at 20pc, highlighting the region’s uneven distribution of technology power. 

It was also noted that Europe’s largest economies are likely to remain overly dependent on resources from foreign technology providers. Sovereignty scores in Germany and Spain will only rise by two percentage points from 34pc in 2025 to 36pc in 2030, France will rise from 33pc to 35pc, the UK from 30pc to 32pc and Italy from 27pc to 29pc.

“Despite these improvements, Europe’s lower scores reflect significant dependencies on chips, cloud, software and data centre capacity,” said the report.

Commenting on the report, Dario Maisto, a principal analyst at Forrester said: “Ongoing geopolitical volatility, AI competition and semiconductor supply chain risks have put tech sovereignty firmly in the spotlight.

“Today, tech sovereignty is concentrated in the hands of a few global leaders, creating an uneven competitive advantage for some countries. To compete in the AI era, nations must understand their strategic dependencies and build durable partnerships that safeguard their data, infrastructure and long-term autonomy.”

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Apple stock ended trading on Friday as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, overtaking Nvidia for the first time since April 2025 after a sustained recovery for the iPhone maker met a sharp selloff in chip stocks.

Apple shares closed at $333.74, leaving the company with a market capitalization of approximately $4.88 CAP trillion. Nvidia ended down about 3.5% on the day, with a value of about $4.86 trillion.

The distinction is largely symbolic, and a lead this narrow could disappear during the next trading session, if not in after-hours trading over the weekend. Still, Apple’s return to the top caps a striking reversal from the tariff, China, and artificial intelligence concerns that weighed on its shares the last time it held the position.

Apple took a difficult route back to the top

Apple entered the spring of 2025 facing doubts about whether its first Apple Intelligence rollout could drive meaningful upgrades. The company confirmed on March 7 that its more personalized Siri features were taking longer than expected.

Tariff fears added a more immediate financial threat. Apple shares lost about 15% during the first half of 2025 as investors considered the company’s reliance on Asian manufacturing.

At the time, Tim Cook warned that tariffs could add about $900 million in costs during the June quarter. It ultimately paid $800 million, but has filed for a refund of those, which Apple says will be used to expand US manufacturing.

Nvidia moved in the opposite direction. Surging demand for AI processors carried the chipmaker back to the top of the market in June 2025, past $4 trillion the following month, and briefly beyond $5 trillion in October.

Apple’s underlying business nevertheless began producing results that were difficult for Wall Street to dismiss. Revenue rose 10% to $94 billion during the June 2025 quarter, followed by an 8% increase to $102.5 billion during the September quarter.

Strong early demand for the iPhone 17 helped Apple reach a $4 trillion valuation in October. Services continued producing record revenue and substantially higher margins than the company’s hardware divisions.

Apple shares lost about 15% during the first half of 2025

Momentum accelerated during fiscal 2026. Apple reported an all-time record of $143.8 billion for the holiday period, up 16%, followed by a March-quarter record of $111.2 billion, up 17%.

The March quarter set records for total revenue, iPhone revenue, earnings per share, and Services. Greater China returned to strong growth despite earlier concerns over local competition and delayed Apple Intelligence features.

Wall Street changed how it views Apple’s AI strategy

Apple previewed Siri AI at WWDC in June, demonstrating the personal context, onscreen awareness, app control, and conversational features promised in 2024. The technology is due with the fall operating-system updates and is already available to beta testers.

The launch reinforced Apple’s strategy of adding AI to products and services without matching the massive infrastructure spending of Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. As investors question those returns, Apple can leave much of the model and data-center expense to partners while distributing AI features across more than two billion active devices.

The March quarter set records for total revenue, iPhone revenue, earnings per share, and Services

Apple is also nearing its first CEO transition since 2011. Tim Cook will become executive chairman on September 1, with hardware engineering chief John Ternus succeeding him, but the planned handoff has done little to slow the stock’s rise.

Nvidia’s decline helped Apple finish the job

Apple didn’t retake the top position because of a single announcement or earnings report. Its valuation recovered over more than a year, while Nvidia’s decline on Friday erased enough market value to allow Apple to move ahead.

Nvidia’s role in the AI industry hasn’t diminished. Its processors remain central to the data-center expansion that pushed the company past Apple, and even a modest rebound could reverse their positions again.

Apple’s return instead suggests Wall Street no longer sees massive AI spending as the only credible path to growth.

After spending much of 2025 as the industry’s most conspicuous AI laggard, record iPhone sales, Services growth, a China recovery, and a tangible Siri roadmap have made Apple’s restraint look more like strategy than failure.

Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, just up the highway from the factory where Tesla is expected to start manufacturing its Optimus robots this year.

Tesla has increasingly bet on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he expects it to be “the biggest product ever” once it’s “useful outside of Tesla sometime next year.”

While Agility doesn’t have Tesla’s capital, it does have a robot, Digit, that is already useful in the real world. The robot is already generating revenue, carrying totes and bins in manufacturing and warehouse settings for customers like Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. The company says it has secured $300 million in contract orders for its robots.

“It’s great to have [Tesla] in the same area as us, because really, for a long time Agility was out there alone, and it’s good to have others in the humanoid space,” CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch. “We have commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their safety bars, their regulatory bars, compliance, plug into their IT infrastructure, plug into their warehouse management system.”

Agility hasn’t disclosed how many Digits that it has built or deployed, but outside observers estimate that dozens have worked in pilot or revenue-generating deployments. The company has said, for example, that Digits have moved 100,000 totes at a GXO logistics facility.

Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse-merger that is expected to make it the first pure-play humanoid robot company on the public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who developed new techniques that allow robots to safely walk on two legs, Agility is trying to capitalize on its lead over a newer generation of AI-inspired robotic startups like Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, or Sunday Robotics.

While the arrival of transformer-based neural networks that helped give rise to LLMs also promises major advancements in robotic behavior, Agility is taking a practical approach to autonomy.

“When you think about self-driving cars, you know, as a non-humanoid example, you really don’t want the anti-lock brake controller under AI control,” Agility co-founder and chairman Damion Shelton told TechCrunch. “The analog with humanoids is all the safety stuff needs to go through a path that’s not generative AI, right? You don’t want to get creative with your safety stack.”

What AI does do, however, is deliver on the promise of scale.

“One of the first times [Bruce Leak, the Quicktime inventor who serves on Agility’s board] asked us how we were going to go about coding applications for the robot, we didn’t really have a good answer,” Shelton said. “The number of things you can imagine a robot doing is far larger than the number of engineers who can program robots. And generative AI answers that question definitively.”

The new facility is designed to accelerate the company’s robotic deployments. Johnson says more than 30 customers are in talks with the company about deploying Digit, and the new facility will be where the six-foot-tall robot learns new skills in environments similar to those it will experience in the field.

Unlike many of the newer entrants to the humanoid space, Agility isn’t planning to offer in-home humanoid robots anytime soon. It’s a view that jibes with that of most independent robotics experts, who believe today’s most powerful robots aren’t safe enough for consumer use. Digit operates in a human-free space right now, but the version 5, expected to be unveiled this fall, will have the ability to sense humans and won’t need to be kept in a robot-only zone.

Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst said there is plenty of work to keep Agility busy in manufacturing and logistics alone.

“Let’s start with the bins and the totes, and then let’s do the picking and the kitting,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “And then let’s like start working on cardboard, which is really hard, and loading and unloading tractor trailers and things like that. Okay, now we’re at 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.”

OS PLATFORMS

22H2 has until 2028, or there’s always Windows 11

Microsoft will end OneDrive synchronization support next month for older versions of Windows 10, leaving users without client updates, fixes, or technical assistance.

According to a post on the company’s Message Center, OneDrive sync app updates will continue on Windows 10 22H2 until October 10, 2028, but will stop for earlier versions from August 15, 2026.

No support means no more updates, fixes, or security patches, although the service itself won’t suddenly stop working. However, users running into problems cannot expect Microsoft to fix them.

The move should not come as a surprise. Support for Windows 10 21H2, the last official release before the final 22H2, ended on June 13, 2023. The message mentions Windows 10 22H1, although this was never officially released by Microsoft – the company switched to an annual release cadence after 21H2.

According to Microsoft, “this change aligns OneDrive support with the Windows lifecycle policy and helps Microsoft focus ongoing investments on supported operating systems.”

Microsoft 365 file synchronization services will also be affected, although, again, nothing will necessarily stop working immediately. Microsoft stated: “Existing installations may continue to function, but future functionality is not guaranteed.”

Users still clinging to Windows 10 versions before 22H2 will have to use the web interface to access OneDrive, which is a good deal less convenient than desktop synchronization. Alternatively, there’s always the upgrade to Windows 11 that Microsoft would dearly like users to make, although OneDrive synchronization on Windows 10 22H2 should be fine until 2028.

There are plenty of alternatives for cloud synchronization. For organizations looking for something a little more sovereign, there are always options like Nextcloud, which told The Register that its synchronization software would work on Windows 10 1809 or later. As with Microsoft, Windows 11 is the recommendation. However, unlike Microsoft, Linux is also an option. ®

With a mammoth 11kg drum, low running costs and impressive performance, the Indesit BWE 111496X WV UK is a great choice for larger households.

The machine is controlled via the dial on its front, with all its available cycles listed on the front drawer too. Alongside standard cycles, such as Eco 40-60 and Cottons, you’ll find Indesit’s special modes for duvets, fast washes and steam modes.

There’s also the Push and Go button, which can be found on other Indesit appliances, and allows you to start a 30°C cycle by pressing and holding it down. Whether this is really useful is debatable, as we’d argue it’s easier to just select your own cycle.

For each wash you have the option to adjust the temperature and spin speeds, plus there’s a button that allows you to select a stain type, upon which the cycle will then adjust to specifically target that kind of mess.

Although this sounds like a clever idea in theory, this stain setting is only compatible with the White cycle, yet the only way to know that is through process of elimination as the manual doesn’t mention this.

Aside from these quirks, the Indesit BWE 111496X WV UK is otherwise easy and intuitive to use.

To begin our tests, we ran the Eco 40-60 cycle which costs an inexpensive 29p to run. Here we found washing performance to be good, although tough stains did struggle to come out. However when we moved to the 20°C wash, not only did running costs drop to just 14p but stain removal was excellent too.

Although the aforementioned White wash at 60°C, with the stain setting enabled, cost a pricier 59p, it’s worth noting that we found it excellent for removing deep, engrained stains with ease.

There’s even a dedicated Ariel Pod setting, which runs at 30°C and costs 35p. Although using pods is convenient, we found stain removal to be a mixed bag, so we wouldn’t recommend opting for this cycle.

Although slightly fiddly to use at first, if you need a large washing machine that performs well and doesn’t have high running costs then the Indesit BWE 111496X WV UK is a fantastic choice for most households.