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Nvidia’s agentic AI stack is the first major platform to ship with security at launch, but governance gaps remain

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For the first time on a major AI platform release, security shipped at launch — not bolted on 18 months later. At Nvidia GTC this week, five security vendors announced protection for Nvidia’s agentic AI stack, four with active deployments, one with validated early integration.

The timing reflects how fast the threat has moved: 48% of cybersecurity professionals rank agentic AI as the top attack vector heading into 2026. Only 29% of organizations feel fully ready to deploy these technologies securely. Machine identities outnumber human employees 82 to 1 in the average enterprise. And IBM’s 2026 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index documented a 44% surge in attacks exploiting public-facing applications, accelerated by AI-enabled vulnerability scanning.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made the case from the GTC keynote stage on Monday: “Agentic systems in the corporate network can access sensitive information, execute code, and communicate externally. Obviously, this can’t possibly be allowed.”

Nvidia defined a unified threat model designed to flex and adapt for the unique strengths of five different vendors. Nvidia also names Google, Microsoft Security and TrendAI as Nvidia OpenShell security collaborators. This article maps the five vendors with embargoed GTC announcements and verifiable deployment commitments on record, an analyst-synthesized reference architecture, not Nvidia’s official canonical stack.

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No single vendor covers all five governance layers. Security leaders can evaluate CrowdStrike for agent decisions and identity, Palo Alto Networks for cloud runtime, JFrog for supply chain provenance, Cisco for prompt-layer inspection, and WWT for pre-production validation. The audit matrix below maps who covers what. Three or more unanswered vendor questions mean ungoverned agents in production.

The five-layer governance framework

This framework draws from the five vendor announcements and the OWASP Agentic Top 10. The left column is the governance layer. The right column is the question every security leader’s vendor should answer. If they can’t answer it, that layer is ungoverned.

Governance Layer

What To Deploy

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Risk If Not

Vendor Question

Who Maps Here

Agent Decisions

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Real-time guardrails on every prompt, response, and action

Poisoned input triggers privileged action

Detect state drift across sessions?

CrowdStrike Falcon AIDR, Cisco AI Defense [runtime enforcement]

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Local Execution

Behavioral monitoring for on-device agents

Local agent runs unprotected

Agent baselines beyond process monitoring?

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CrowdStrike Falcon Endpoint [runtime enforcement]; WWT ARMOR [pre-prod validation]

Cloud Ops

Runtime enforcement across cloud deployments

Agent-to-agent privilege escalation

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Trust policies between agents?

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security [runtime enforcement]; Palo Alto Prisma AIRS [AI Factory validated design]

Identity

Scoped privileges per agent identity

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Inherited creds; delegation compounds

Privilege inheritance in delegation?

CrowdStrike Falcon Identity [runtime enforcement]; Palo Alto Networks/CyberArk [identity governance platform]

Supply Chain

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Model scanning + provenance before deploy

Compromised model hits production

Provenance from registry to runtime?

JFrog Agent Skills Registry [pre-deployment]; CrowdStrike Falcon

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Five-layer governance audit matrix. Three or more unanswered vendor questions indicate ungoverned agents in production. [runtime enforcement] = inline controls active during agent execution. [pre-deployment] = controls applied before artifacts reach runtime. [pre-prod validation] = proving-ground testing before production rollout. [AI Factory validated design] = Nvidia reference architecture integration, not OpenShell-launch coupling.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform embeds at four distinct enforcement points in the Nvidia OpenShell runtime: AIDR at the prompt-response-action layer, Falcon Endpoint on DGX Spark and DGX Station hosts, Falcon Cloud Security across AI-Q Blueprint deployments, and Falcon Identity for agent privilege boundaries. Palo Alto Networks enforces at the BlueField DPU hardware layer within Nvidia’s AI Factory validated design. JFrog governs the artifact supply chain from the registry through signing. WWT validates the full stack pre-production in a live environment. Cisco runs an independent guardrail at the prompt layer.

CrowdStrike and Nvidia are also building what they call intent-aware controls. That phrase matters. An agent constrained to certain data is access-controlled. An agent whose planning loop is monitored for behavioral drift is governed. Those are different security postures, and the gap between them is where the 4% error rate at 5x speed becomes dangerous.

Why the blast radius math changed

Daniel Bernard, CrowdStrike’s chief business officer, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview what the blast radius of a compromised AI agent looks like compared to a compromised human credential.

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“Anything we could think about from a blast radius before is unbounded,” Bernard said. “The human attacker needs to sleep a couple of hours a day. In the agentic world, there’s no such thing as a workday. It’s work-always.”

That framing tracks with architectural reality. A human insider with stolen credentials works within biological limits: typing speed, attention span, a schedule. An AI agent with inherited credentials operates at compute speed across every API, database, and downstream agent it can reach. No fatigue. No shift change. CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report puts the fastest observed eCrime breakout at 27 seconds and average breakout times at 29 minutes. An agentic adversary doesn’t have an average. It runs until you stop it.

When VentureBeat asked Bernard about the 96% accuracy number and what happens in the 4%, his answer was operational, not promotional: “Having the right kill switches and fail-safes so that if the wrong thing is decided, you’re able to quickly get to the right thing.” The implication is worth sitting on. 96% accuracy at 5x speed means the errors that get through arrive five times faster than they used to. The oversight architecture has to match the detection speed. Most SOCs are not designed for that.

Bernard’s broader prescription: “The opportunity for customers is to transform their SOCs from history museums into autonomous fighting machines.” Walk into the average enterprise SOC and inventory what’s running there. He’s not wrong.

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On analyst oversight when agents get it wrong, Bernard drew the governance line: “We want to keep not only agents in the loop, but also humans in the loop of the actions that the SOC is taking when that variance in what normal is realized. We’re on the same team.”

The full vendor stack

Each of the five vendors occupies a different enforcement point the other four do not. CrowdStrike’s architectural depth in the matrix reflects four announced OpenShell integration points; security leaders should weigh all five based on their existing tooling and threat model.

Cisco shipped Secure AI Factory with AI Defense, extending Hybrid Mesh Firewall enforcement to Nvidia BlueField DPUs and adding AI Defense guardrails to the OpenShell runtime. In multi-vendor deployments, Cisco AI Defense and Falcon AIDR run as parallel guardrails: AIDR enforcing inside the OpenShell sandbox, AI Defense enforcing at the network perimeter. A poisoned prompt that evades one still hits the other.

Palo Alto Networks runs Prisma AIRS on Nvidia BlueField DPUs as part of the Nvidia AI Factory validated design, offloading inspection to the data processing unit at the network hardware layer, below the hypervisor and outside the host OS kernel. This integration is best understood as a validated reference architecture pairing rather than a tight OpenShell runtime coupling. Palo Alto intercepts east-west agent traffic on the wire; CrowdStrike monitors agent process behavior inside the runtime. Same cloud runtime row, different integration model and maturity stage.

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JFrog announced the Agent Skills Registry, a system of record for MCP servers, models, agent skills, and agentic binary assets within Nvidia’s AI-Q architecture. Early integration with Nvidia has been validated, with full OpenShell support in active development. JFrog Artifactory will serve as a governed registry for AI skills, scanning, verifying, and signing every skill before agents can adopt it. This is the only pre-deployment enforcement point in the stack. As Chief Strategy Officer Gal Marder put it: “Just as a malicious software package can compromise an application, an unvetted skill can guide an agent to perform harmful actions.”

Worldwide Technology launched a Securing AI Lab inside its Advanced Technology Center, built on Nvidia AI factories and the Falcon platform. WWT’s vendor-agnostic ARMOR framework is a pre-production validation and proving-ground capability, not an inline runtime control. It validates how the integrated stack behaves in a live AI factory environment before any agent touches production data, surfacing control interactions, failure modes, and policy conflicts before they become incidents.

Three MDR numbers: what they actually measure

On the MDR side, CrowdStrike fine-tuned Nvidia Nemotron models on first-party threat data and operational SOC data from Falcon Complete engagements. Internal benchmarks show 5x faster investigations, 3x higher triage accuracy in high-confidence benign classification, and 96% accuracy in generating investigation queries within Falcon LogScale. Kroll, a global risk advisory and managed security firm that runs Falcon Complete as its MDR backbone, confirmed the results in production.

Because Kroll operates Falcon Complete as its core MDR platform rather than as a neutral third-party evaluator, their validation is operationally meaningful but not independent in the audit sense. Industry-wide third-party benchmarks for agentic SOC accuracy do not yet exist. Treat reported numbers as indicative, not audited.

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The 5x investigation speed compares average agentic investigation time (8.5 minutes) against the longest observed human investigation in CrowdStrike’s internal testing: a ceiling, not a mean. The 3x triage accuracy measures one internal model against another. The 96% accuracy applies specifically to generating Falcon LogScale investigation queries via natural language, not to overall threat detection or alert classification.

JFrog’s Agent Skills Registry operates beneath all four CrowdStrike enforcement layers, scanning, signing, and governing every model and skill before any agent can adopt it — with early Nvidia integration validated and full OpenShell support in active development.

Six enterprises are already in deployment

EY selected the CrowdStrike-Nvidia stack to power Agentic SOC services for global enterprises. Nebius ships with Falcon integrated into its AI cloud from day one. CoreWeave CISO Jim Higgins signed off on the Blueprint. Mondelēz North America Regional CISO Emmett Koen said the capability lets his team “focus on higher-value response and decision-making.”

MGM Resorts International CISO Bryan Green endorsed WWT’s validated testing environments, saying enterprises need “validated environments that embed protection from the start.” These range from vendor selection and platform validation to production integration. The signal is converging across buyer types, not uniform at-scale deployment.

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What the five-vendor stack does not cover

The governance framework above represents real progress. It also has three holes that every security leader deploying agentic AI will eventually hit. No vendor at GTC closed any of them. Knowing where they are is as important as knowing what shipped.

  1. Agent-to-agent trust. When agents delegate to other agents, credentials compound. The OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications lists tool call hijacking and orchestrator manipulation as top-tier risks. Independent research from BlueRock Security scanning over 7,000 MCP servers found 36.7% contain vulnerabilities. An arXiv preprint study across 847 scenarios found a 23 to 41% increase in attack success rates in MCP integrations versus non-MCP. No vendor at GTC demonstrated a complete trust policy framework for agent-to-agent delegation. This is the layer where the 82:1 identity ratio becomes a governance crisis, not just an inventory problem.

  2. Memory integrity. Agents with persistent memory create an attack surface that stateless LLM deployments do not have. Poison an agent’s long-term memory once. Influence its decisions weeks later. The OWASP Agentic Top 10 flags this explicitly. CrowdStrike’s intent-aware controls are the closest architectural response announced at GTC. Implementation details remain forward-looking.

  3. Registry-to-runtime provenance. JFrog’s Agent Skills Registry addresses the registry side of this problem. The gap that remains is the last mile: end-to-end provenance requires proving the model executing in production is the exact artifact scanned and signed in the registry. That cryptographic continuity from registry to runtime is still an engineering problem, not a solved capability.

What running five vendors actually costs

The governance matrix is a coverage map, not an implementation plan. Running five vendors across five enforcement layers introduces real operational overhead that the GTC announcements did not address. Someone has to own policy orchestration: deciding which vendor’s guardrail wins when AIDR and AI Defense return conflicting verdicts on the same prompt. Someone has to normalize telemetry across Falcon LogScale, Prisma AIRS, and JFrog Artifactory into a single incident workflow. And someone has to manage change control when one vendor ships a runtime update that shifts how another vendor’s enforcement layer behaves.

A realistic phased rollout looks like this: start with the supply chain layer (JFrog), because it operates pre-deployment and has no runtime dependencies on the other four. Add identity governance (Falcon Identity) second, because scoped agent credentials limit blast radius before you instrument the runtime. Then instrument the agent decision layer (Falcon AIDR or Cisco AI Defense, depending on your existing vendor footprint), then cloud runtime, then local execution. Running all five simultaneously from day one is an integration project, not a configuration task. Budget for it accordingly.

What to do before your next board meeting

Here is what every CISO should be able to say after running the framework above: “We have audited every autonomous agent against five governance layers. Here is what’s in place, and here are the five questions we are holding vendors to.” If you cannot say that today, the issue is not that you are behind schedule. The issue is that no schedule existed. Five vendors just shipped the architectural scaffolding for one.

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Do four things before your next board meeting:

  1. Run the five-layer audit. Pull every autonomous agent your organization has in production or staging. Map each one against the five governance rows above. Mark which vendor questions you can answer and which you cannot.

  2. Count the unanswered questions. Three or more means ungoverned agents in production. That is your board number, not a backlog item.

  3. Pressure-test the three open gaps. Ask your vendors, explicitly: How do you handle agent-to-agent trust across MCP delegation chains? How do you detect memory poisoning in persistent agent stores? Can you show a cryptographic binding between the registry scan and the runtime load? None of the five vendors at GTC has a complete answer. That is not an accusation. It is where the next year of agentic security gets built.

  4. Establish the oversight model before you scale. Bernard put it plainly: keep agents and humans in the loop. 96% accuracy at 5x speed means errors arrive faster than any SOC designed for human-speed detection can catch them. The kill switches and fail-safes have to be in place before the agents run at scale, not after the first missed breach.

The scaffolding is necessary. It is not sufficient. Whether it changes your posture depends on whether you treat the five-layer framework as a working instrument or skip past it in the vendor deck.

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One of Our Favorite 360 Cams Is 35 Percent Off

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Tired of taking your action camera on an adventure, only to get home and find out you missed the action with a bad angle? One option is to switch to a 360-degree action cam, so you can capture all of the action and then edit down to just the good stuff later. One of our favorite options, the DJI Osmo 360, is currently available for just $390 on Amazon, a $209 discount from its usual price, and it comes with a selfie stick and an extra battery.

The DJI Osmo 360 achieves its impressive all-around video quality by leveraging a pair of 1/1.1-inch sensors, larger than some other offerings, and by supporting 10-bit color. You can really see that in the camera’s output, with colors that are vivid and bold, to the point that you may need to dial them back a bit in post if you want something more natural. With support for up to 50 frames per second at 8K when recording in 360 degrees, or 120 fps at 4K when shooting with only one sensor, you’ll have plenty of material to work with. In our testing, it ran for just shy of two hours at 30 fps, which is also around the time the internal storage had filled up anyway.

If you plan on catching any serious discussions with your Osmo 360, you’ll be pleased to know it connects directly to DJI’s line of wireless lavalier microphones, including the excellent and frequently discounted DJI Mic 2 and Mic Mini. If you want to mount it to something other than the included 1.2-meter selfie stick, it has both DJI’s magnetic attachment system and a more traditional ¼”-20 tripod mount. The DJI Mimo app lets you control the camera and adjust any settings, and there’s even a simple editor for on-the-fly production. For desktop users, DJI Studio has even more in-depth settings and editing options, in case you don’t want to pay for Premiere.

The DJI Osmo 360 is one of our favorite action cameras, and is particularly appealing at the discounted price point, but make sure to check out our full review for more info, or head over to our full roundup to see what else is available.

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The League of Legends KeSPA cup will air globally on Disney+

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Disney has inked a deal with the Korea Esports Association that will bring several gaming tournaments to the its streaming platform. Disney+ will be the global live streaming home for Esports Champions Asia Jinju 2026, the 2026 League of Legends KeSPA CUP and some preliminary events ahead of the 20th Asian Games Aichi-Nagoya 2026. This agreement expands KeSPA’s arrangement with Disney, which only streamed its esports events to viewers in Asia last year.

Esports Champions Asia is the first event on the calendar, occurring April 24-26 with professional teams from across the continent squaring up in tournaments for games including Street Fighter 6, The King of Fighters XV, TEKKEN 8 and the eFootball series. Disney+ will also be an official streamer for the PUBG Mobile and Eternal Return competitions during that weekend.

It could be helpful for western esports fans to have a single location for watching the major events happening in Asia. However, many tournaments are currently free to watch on Twitch or YouTube, so now needing a Disney+ subscription to catch some of these international competitions might feel onerous. Esports might run the risk of turning into the fragmented set of rights deals that plagues traditional sports leagues, where a game could be on one of a half dozen different paid services each night. It’s also likely going to mean co-streamers take a hit to their viewership, since Disney seems unlikely to offer the same sort of broadcast access that has made the practice popular on Twitch.

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So Expensive, A Caveman Can Do It

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A few years back a company had an ad campaign with a discouraged caveman who was angry because the company claimed their website was “so easy, even a caveman could do it.” Maybe that inspired [JuliusBrussee] to create caveman, a tool for reducing costs when using Claude Code.

The trick is that Claude, like other LLMs, operates on tokens. Tokens aren’t quite words, but they are essentially words or word fragments. Most LLM plans also charge you by the token. So fewer tokens means lower costs. However, LLMs can be quite verbose, unless you make them talk like a caveman.

For example, here is some normal output from Claude:

Sure! I’d be happy to help you with that. The issue you’re experiencing is most likely caused by your authentication middleware not properly validating the token expiry. Let me take a look and suggest a fix.

After Caveman that is reduced to:

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Bug in auth middleware. Token expiry check use < not <=. Fix:

Turns out, you can understand the caveman output just fine.

There are a few rules. Caveman removes filler words, but knows to keep technical terms, code blocks, and error messages intact. It also outputs normal messages for things like commits.

As the website says: “Caveman not dumb. Caveman efficient. Caveman say what need saying. Then stop. If caveman save you mass token, mass money — leave mass star.”

If you want to code with an LLM, make sure you understand the terms of service. If you want to learn more about how LLMs work with tokens and other details, but want to skip the math, we can help with that.

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Apple may have scraped YouTube videos without permission for AI training

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A collection of YouTube channels are suing Apple under the provisions of the DMCA, with the company accused of scraping videos from YouTube and using them to train internal AI models.

Glowing multicolored looped ribbon forming a rounded star shape around a dark central hexagon, on a deep maroon background with subtle reflection below
Apple is accused of scraping YouTube to train its video AI models.

In a lawsuit filed on April 3 at the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, a trio of YouTube entities are suing Apple over allegations of copyright infringement. Apple is accused of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), all to collect footage to train its AI models.
The class-action lawsuit is headed up by Ted Entertainment, owners of the h3h3Productions channels and podcast. Two golf channels accompany Ted Entertainment, with MrShortGameGolf and Golfholics also involved in the legal action.
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Border Patrol Agents Sold Challenge Coins With ‘Charlotte’s Web’ Characters in Riot Gear

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US Border Patrol agents are raising money by selling coins that commemorate last year’s wave of immigration enforcement “operations” across the country, along with other merchandise. The funds are for nonprofit organizations that list Border Patrol buildings as their address in IRS paperwork. At least two of the organizations have dedicated US Customs and Border Protection email addresses.

The front side of one coin for sale reads, “NORTH AMERICAN TOUR 2025,” along with the acronyms for US Border Patrol and the acronym for “fuck around and find out”—a phrase that was initially popularized by the far-right group the Proud Boys and has been used by various Trump officials. In the center, the coin depicts a gas mask, a riot control smoke grenade, and a pepper ball launcher. On the other side, the coin appears to have a portrait of Border Patrol’s now retired commander-at-large, Gregory Bovino, with his arm raised in a salute, along with the text “COMING TO A CITY NEAR YOU!” It lists seven cities, many of which actually saw federal enforcement surges in 2025: Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Phoenix, Portland, Charlotte, and Atlanta.

The coin is for sale by Willcox Morale Welfare and Recreation, a nonprofit that the IRS most recently declared tax-exempt during the Biden administration and whose address on IRS paperwork matches that of the Willcox Border Patrol Station in Arizona. A request for comment sent to Willcox MWR’s dedicated CBP email address went unanswered.

Employees of the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency for Border Patrol, are allowed to start private, not-for-profit employee associations within DHS, so long as they get formally recognized by the agency and follow certain rules. According to DHS policies, officially recognized groups can fundraise using government property and create merchandise with the agency’s name and logos–but they have to receive advance approval from the agency.

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Willcox MWR is just one of several groups across the country that cater to Border Patrol agents and refer to themselves as MWRs, a reference to the US military’s “morale, welfare and recreation” programs. The groups tend to throw holiday events and retirement parties, and sometimes raise money for the families of agents going through hard times, including those not getting paid during the current shutdown.

Following the publication of this story, CBP spokesperson Hilton Beckham told WIRED that Willcox MWR and the other non-profits identified in our story had existed under previous administrations and had “received authorization to conduct limited commercial activities on CBP-occupied property.” Beckham said that the agency was in the process of updating its policies and procedures related to MWRs.

Many MWRs also sell customized medallions known as “challenge coins” that commemorate specific teams or events. While anyone, including CBP alumni, can design and sell coins, current DHS employees are not supposed to use government resources to sell ones that use the agency’s seals or logos without permission, or ones that the agency considers inappropriate or unprofessional.

Beckham, the CBP spokesperson, said, “CBP takes its branding and recognition policies seriously.” Beckham did not say whether the agency’s Publication and Branding Review Board, which is in charge of approving branded merchandise, greenlit “North American Tour” coin design.

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Under Willcox MWR’s Facebook post about the “North American Tour” coin, someone named Juan Diego commented, “Sign up SDC BK5 MWR for 10.”

“Shoot us an email,” someone managing the Willcox MWR account replied, giving out what appeared to be a dedicated cbp.dhs.gov email address for the group.

SDC BK5 MWR, also a registered nonprofit, lists an address on its website that matches that of a government facility in Chula Vista, California. It says on its site that it was started by San Diego Sector Border Patrol agents and sells custom merchandise “designed to raise funds for morale and relief efforts.”

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Gas prices aren’t the only factor fueling used EV sales

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The most recent electric vehicle sales data provided a grim picture — at least for new EVs. Sales of new electric vehicles took a beating in the first quarter, falling some 28% year-over-year after the Trump administration axed the $7,500 consumer tax credit, according to Cox Automotive.

Used EVs are moving in the opposite direction. And a couple of accelerants have combined to supercharge those sales.

First-quarter used EV sales increased 12% compared with the same quarter last year, according to that same Cox Automotive report. There’s a bit of momentum over a shorter term too; used EV sales popped 17% between the fourth and first quarters.

The rising cost of gas — the average price is above $4 a gallon — has helped spur interest and sales of electric vehicles. But there’s another factor at play here as consumers seek out affordable options: an abundance of expiring leases, the Financial Times reported. EV leases were a popular choice in the early 2020s, and now that they’ve expired, hundreds of thousands of pre-owned EVs are entering the marketplace. And consumers are ready for them.

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By the end of the year, EVs will account for 15% of all off-lease vehicles, double from 7.7% in the first quarter, the FT reported.

The ol’ economic principle of supply and demand remained steadfast; the surge of pre-owned vehicles helped push prices lower, giving those sales a further boost. That’s led to price parity — or close to it — with internal combustion vehicles. According to Cox Automotive, the average price of a used EV is $34,821 compared to $33,487 for the gas engine equivalent.

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Modular Mechanical Keyboard Transformed Into A Compact Workstation

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3D printing is a staple of the hacker community. From decorative items to rugged functional parts, almost anything you can think of, can be printed. [anurag.id] shows us some classic 3D printing hacks by converting his keyboard into a compact workstation.

Like any hacker project, the initial idea is small: he decides the knob on his mechanical keyboard is boring, so he designs some alternatives. First, one “retro style” knob. Then, like any good project, the scope creep begins. He makes another knob, and another… by the end he has 6 different designs! But don’t worry, the scope can get even bigger. He decides his ipad needs a good stand on his desk–and what better place to put it than on the keyboard? Now it’s starting to look like a real little workstation. Finally, as a finishing touch, he adds some magnetically-attached wrist rests for a compact, ergonomic workstation.

Video after the break.

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P.S.: Bonus points for the good video editing.

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Are Electric Bag Resealers the Key to Chip Freshness? I Tested 2 to Find Out

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If you’re anything like me, a trip to the grocery store is a joy ride for the taste buds. As soon as I get home, I tear into my finds and determine what will take priority when the urge to snack or nosh strikes. 

The result, unfortunately, is a sea of open bags that quickly lose their crunch and freshness. Chips and pretzels, for example, become stale, while bagged produce begins to wilt and brown. 

While there are vacuum-sealed bags and accompanying air-removal devices, nothing compares to the efficiency and ease of a handheld sealer. These simple gadgets are designed to fuse the open ends of plastic containers using quick heat to prolong food’s shelf life and general tastiness. 

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bag sealers side by side

My small cohort of bag sealers, ready for testing. 

Joey Skladany/CNET

I tested two of the highest-rated models on Amazon to determine which deserves a permanent place in my kitchen. Here’s how they stacked up. 

The devices 

Upon opening each package, I was surprised to see that both models offer additional capabilities beyond sealing. Each uses USB-C for charging (with a cable included).

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BBDYOY three-in-one mini bag sealer 

$12.99 on Amazon

bag sealer and charger on table

This cheaper bag sealer came to temperature almost immediately.

Joey Skladany/CNET

Special Features: Compact size, bag slicer, magnet

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The good: 

  • Compact size: This was preferred over Aedicce, which felt a bit too bulky. It also takes up less space in a drawer or shelf.
  • The sealing surface area: The compartment where you insert the bag edge is deeper, which makes the device easier to use. 
  • No preheating: Unlike the Aedicce model, the BBDYOY heats up almost instantly. 
  • The cutter: It’s sharper than the Aedicce and opens bags with ease. 
  • Comes with two freebies: The company included two resealable, backpack-shaped bags, which are quite adorable for a kid’s school lunch. 

The bad: 

  • Instructions aren’t in English: While the illustrations were easy enough to decipher, the Mandarin characters can be a bit intimidating for anyone who considers themselves tech-averse. 
  • Difficulty sealing foil-lined bags: It had trouble sealing bags with metalized film-lined interiors. 

Aedicce four-in-one mini bag sealer 

$15.99 on Amazon

bag sealer on table

The Aedicce device took longer to heat up, but worked just as well once it did.

Joey Skladany/CNET

Special Features: Bag slicer, hanging hook/bottle opener, built-in light, magnet 

The good 

  • Multiple functions: Beyond sealing, this device hangs, opens bottles and provides an emergency light, giving customers more bang for their buck. 
  • A stronger seal: While it takes longer to heat up, I did notice the seal was ever so slightly stronger than BBDYOY’s. 
  • Power indicator light: You’ll know when the battery is running low, so it doesn’t die on you mid-use. 
  • High-quality: It feels and looks more expensive than the BBDYOY model. 
bag sealer sealing plastic bag of granola

Both devices worked well for sealing plastic bags.

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Joey Skladany/CNET

The bad

  • It’s somewhat pricey: At $16, it’s certainly a significantly higher investment than a standard bag clip. 
  • Difficulty sealing foil-lined bags: It ran into the same issue as the BBDYOY and had trouble sealing this type of bag.
slightly open bag of chips shot from above

Both devices had trouble creating a tight seal on chip bags with a layer of vaporized aluminum. 

Joey Skladany/CNET

Final thoughts 

While both models worked well with fusing standard plastic, neither successfully sealed the metalized film commonly used in chip bags. My assumption is that this material is harder to melt and, ultimately, fuse together.

Though disappointing, it wouldn’t deter me from purchasing either product, as plastic clips can only do so much to keep open bags closed and free of air. That said, the aforementioned vacuum sealer will make any handheld device pale in comparison and should be the choice for bulky items or long-term freezer storage. 

Both bag releasers I tested performed equally well, creating a tight clamp on plastic bags but struggling to seal anything with a layer of vaporized aluminum. So, you can’t go wrong with either option. Splurge a bit more for the Aedicce if you want extra tools, but the BBDYOY works just as well and fits in smaller spaces when not in use. 

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Elgato Galleon 100 SD review: Mac productivity & streamer's dream

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The Elgato Galleon 100 SD combines a keyboard with the Stream Deck, producing a two-in-one productivity-focused peripheral that Mac users should really consider.

Black Corsair mechanical keyboard with teal backlit keys, integrated right-side macro pad with small screen and icons, two control knobs, on a light wooden desk.
Elgato Galleon 100 SD

Corsair subsidiary Elgato stands out as one of the leading manufacturers of peripherals and equipment tailored to the ever-growing market of streaming. From microphones to chairs to Stream Decks, Elgato is synonymous with top-tier equipment and streams across Twitch and YouTube.
Its latest offering, the Galleon 100 SD, sees Elgato taking a leap of faith. One to fully integrate the functionality of its rock-solid Stream Decks into a sturdy mechanical keyboard for work and play, bringing an all-in-one experience to streamers and multitaskers everywhere.
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A Single Strike Won’t Shut Off the Gulf’s Desalination System

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Across the region, facilities tied to water and power—including desalination plants—have been damaged or exposed to risk as Iranian strikes extend beyond traditional targets.

A single strike, however, is unlikely to shut off the gulf’s water supply. The system is designed to absorb isolated disruption, but sustained or multisite attacks would begin to strain supply far more quickly.

“In the Gulf, desalination is built with enough breathing room that losing one plant doesn’t immediately show up at the tap,” says Rabee Rustum, professor of water and environmental engineering at Heriot-Watt University Dubai.

In Kuwait, Iranian drone attacks have damaged two power and desalination facilities and ignited fires at two oil sites. Other sites, including Fujairah in the UAE, have been identified as potentially exposed.

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“Striking desalination plants would be a strategic move, but it would also come very close to, and in some cases cross, a red line,” says Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London.

Water infrastructure, Krieg explains, occupies a distinct category. “Water infrastructure is not just another utility. In places that depend on desalination, it underpins civilian survival, public health, hospital function, sanitation, and basic state legitimacy.”

Krieg notes that international humanitarian law gives special protection to civilian objects and to objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. “Which is precisely why attacks on water systems carry such grave legal and moral weight,” Krieg adds.

The incidents highlight a structural reality: Desalination is central to water supply in the gulf, and disruption carries immediate implications for daily life.

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How the System Absorbs Disruption

At first glance, desalination appears vulnerable. Shut down a plant, and supply is reduced. In practice, the system is designed with layers of redundancy.

Plants operate across multiple locations, allowing output to be redistributed if one facility slows down. Water is also stored at different points across the network, including central reservoirs and building-level tanks, creating a buffer that delays disruption.

According to a statement to WIRED Middle East by Veolia, an environmental services provider whose technologies account for nearly 19 percent of desalination capacity in the region, “the region’s water supply is diversified thanks to a network of numerous facilities distributed along the coastline.”

The company adds that distribution systems are interconnected, allowing plants to “support and substitute for one another when necessary,” helping maintain continuity of service.

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In the UAE, storage capacity typically covers around one week, while in other parts of the region it may be limited to two to three days, Veolia says.

In practice, this means the system can absorb disruption for a limited period. Once reserves are depleted, water supply depends on whether plants can continue producing enough water to meet demand.

The System That Produces Water

Unlike most regions, the Gulf does not rely on rivers or rainfall. It depends on a network of desalination plants along its coastline that convert seawater into potable water on a continuous basis.

Seawater is drawn into treatment facilities, filtered and processed either through reverse osmosis—forcing it through membranes to remove salt and impurities—or through thermal methods that evaporate and condense water. The resulting supply is distributed through pipelines, stored in reservoirs, and delivered to homes, hospitals, and industry.

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This is not a flexible system. It is designed to operate continuously, producing water at a scale that sustains cities, industrial activity, and essential services. Gulf states produce roughly 40 percent of the world’s desalinated water, operating more than 400 plants across the region.

Dependence varies by country but is high everywhere. In the UAE, desalination accounts for 41 to 42 percent of total water supply, while in Kuwait, it provides around 90 percent of drinking water, and in Saudi Arabia, approximately 70 percent.

When Disruption Becomes Visible

For residents, disruption would not be felt immediately—water would continue to flow.

Rustum explains that buildings are supported by internal storage and pumping systems, meaning early changes in supply may not be apparent. In many cases, water pressure remains stable, even as the wider system adjusts.

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