A whopping 69% of organizations have reported paying ransoms this year, according to research by Cohesity, with 46% handing over a quarter of a million dollars or more to cybercriminals. It is hardly the picture of resiliency that is often painted by industry. Clearly, there is a disconnect between cyber resiliency policy and operational capability that urgently needs addressing. 

With the advent of Ransomware-as-a-Service platforms and the current global geopolitical situation, organizations face a huge existential threat through destructive cyber attacks that could put them out of business. This gap between confidence and capability needs to be addressed, but in order to do so, those organizations need to recognize there is a problem in the first place.

Up to now, airfare search results on Google Flights have prioritized a combination of price and convenience over cost alone. This means you might be missing the cheapest options and spending more than you need to.

Via an update to its online tool rolling out gradually over the next couple of weeks, Google is finally making it easier to surface the best-priced airfares for your journey, though you may be sacrificing a bit of convenience if you opt for one of them.

“For example, there could be a third-party booking site offering a lower price than the airline itself,” Google explained in a blog post announcing the update. “Or you might be able to save by flying back to a different airport that’s in the same city you departed from — like flying out of New York’s LaGuardia and returning to JFK.”

The update puts a new “Cheapest” tab on Google Flights’ search page, while the most convenient options (according to Google Flights, at least) will appear beside it under the “Best” tab.

For sure, you might find some of the options under the “Cheapest” tab showing longer layovers, self-transfers, or a requirement to purchase different legs of the trip through multiple airlines or booking sites. But as Google points out in its post, “For those times when cost matters more than convenience, the new tab gives you an easy way to see the lowest prices available,” leaving you to decide which option works best for you.

Google has been gradually improving its Flights tool since launching it in 2011. In a more recent update, the tech giant added a feature that suggests the best time to book a cheap flight. Google Flights also offers price tracking, which, once set up, automatically alerts you if a fare for your route sees a notable fall.

Adobe is one of the top names in the multimedia content creation and editing segment. While back, the company announced that it was working on its own AI-powered features to adapt to the industry and offer advanced experiences. Recently, Adobe launched the Firefly video generation suite in beta to compete with Movie Gen and others. Now, Adobe has offered a sneak peek at several upcoming AI editing tools, including one for sound generation, during its latest MAX Creativity Conference.

Currently, Adobe is working on up to nine new AI-powered features to help creators make their visions a reality. The tools will be part of PhotoShop and Premiere Pro. Currently, there is no date for the wide rollout of all the options.

Adobe AI editing tools that are arriving in the future

First up is Project Perfect Blend for PS, a tool that yields higher-quality results when blending images. It pays special attention to the correct handling of shadows during the process for a more realistic result. Project Clean Machine is a feature that aims to remove annoying glare from pictures. It also effectively removes objects from images while maintaining a natural appearance.

Project In Motion is another of Adobe’s upcoming AI-powered features. The tool will be able to transform animations according to your prompts, allowing you to turn current projects into something entirely new. On the other hand, Project Know-How is a tool that finds and identifies the source of a specific file. The latter is especially useful for content authentication tasks.

Adobe even has a sound generation tool

There’s also Project Turntable, a useful feature that will allow you to rotate 2D vector art in 3D in any direction you want. The option uses the power of generative AI to correctly fill in blank spaces when rotating the file. Adobe will also be releasing an AI-powered sound generation tool called Project Super Sonic. The feature will be able to generate sounds according to custom prompts. You can even simply click on a section of the image to have the feature analyze it and generate a related sound.

Plus, Adobe is working on integrating its suite of creative tools with Microsoft Copilot through Project Scenic. This tool will have the ability to generate complete 3D scenes in response to prompts. You will be able to fine-tune the 3D scene with instructions about the camera and items. There will also be a “Project Remix A Lot” tool that allows you to “remix” multiple projects to get a new one. Then, you can start editing the results.

You can also convert sketches into art automatically

Lastly, Adobe is working on Project Hi-Fi, an AI-powered sketch-to-image tool. As the name suggests, Project Hi-Fi will allow you to turn your sketches or drawings into high-quality art that you can use. This tool can save you quite a bit of time when it comes to making your creations a reality.

Amazon is sunsetting the Kindle Oasis. This decision means there will be no models of the ereader remaining with physical buttons for turning pages. “Once current inventory of Kindle Oasis sells out online and in stores, we will not restock the device,” Amazon rep Devon Corvasce told . “Today, all of our devices are touch-forward which is what our customers are comfortable with.”

The Oasis model in 2016. Its lightweight, asymmetrical design for one-handed use was a standout, but the high price tag may have kept most people from really considering the product. If you are not most comfortable with a touch interface for your reading, there are still options for flipping pages via buttons on the market. The Kobo Libra Color is .

Even with the Oasis becoming nothing but a mirage, the Kindle family isn’t getting any smaller. Amazon announced several upgrades to the device line this week, including its first ever color ereader in the . We also got hands-on time with the latest and the has also received a refresh.

Photonic computing startup Lightmatter has raised $400 million to blow one of modern data centers’ bottlenecks wide open. The company’s optical interconnect layer allows hundreds of GPUs to work synchronously, streamlining the costly and complex job of training and running AI models.

The growth of AI and its correspondingly immense compute requirements have supercharged the data center industry, but it’s not as simple as plugging in another thousand GPUs. As high-performance computing experts have known for years, it doesn’t matter how fast each node of your supercomputer is if those nodes are idle half the time waiting for data to come in.

The interconnect layer or layers are really what turn racks of CPUs and GPUs into effectively one giant machine — so it follows that the faster the interconnect, the faster the data center. And it is looking like Lightmatter builds the fastest interconnect layer by a long shot, by using the photonic chips it’s been developing since 2018.

“Hyperscalers know if they want a computer with a million nodes, they can’t do it with Cisco traditional switches. Once you leave the rack, you go from high-density interconnect to basically a cup on a string,” Nick Harris, CEO and founder of the company, told TechCrunch. (You can see a short talk he gave summarizing this issue here.)

The state of the art, he said, is NVLink and particularly the NVL72 platform, which puts 72 Nvidia Blackwell units wired together in a rack, capable of a maximum of 1.4 exaFLOPs at FP4 precision. But no rack is an island, and all that compute has to be squeezed out through 7 terabits of “scale up” networking. Sounds like a lot, and it is, but the inability to network these units faster to each other and to other racks is one of the main barriers to improving performance.

“For a million GPUs, you need multiple layers of switches, and that adds a huge latency burden,” said Harris. “You have to go from electrical to optical to electrical to optical… the amount of power you use and the amount of time you wait is huge. And it gets dramatically worse in bigger clusters.”

So what’s Lightmatter bringing to the table? Fiber. Lots and lots of fiber, routed through a purely optical interface. With up to 1.6 terabits per fiber (using multiple colors), and up to 256 fibers per chip… well, let’s just say that 72 GPUs at 7 terabits starts to sound positively quaint.

“Photonics is coming way faster than people thought — people have been struggling to get it working for years, but we’re there,” said Harris. “After seven years of absolutely murderous grind,” he added.

The photonic interconnect currently available from Lightmatter does 30 terabits, while the on-rack optical wiring is capable of letting 1,024 GPUs work synchronously in their own specially designed racks. In case you’re wondering, the two numbers don’t increase by similar factors because a lot of what would need to be networked to another rack can be done on-rack in a thousand-GPU cluster. (And anyway, 100 terabit is on its way.)

The market for this is huge, Harris pointed out, with every major data center company from Microsoft to Amazon to newer entrants like xAI and OpenAI showing an endless appetite for compute. “They’re linking together buildings! I wonder how long they can keep it up,” he said.

Many of these hyperscalers are already customers, though Harris wouldn’t name any. “Think of Lightmatter a little like a foundry, like TSMC,” he said. “We don’t pick favorites or attach our name to other people’s brands. We provide a roadmap and a platform for them — just helping grow the pie.”

But, he added coyly, “you don’t quadruple your valuation without leveraging this tech,” perhaps an allusion to OpenAI’s recent funding round valuing the company at $157 billion, but the remark could just as easily be about his own company.

This $400 million D round values it at $4.4 billion, a similar multiple of its mid-2023 valuation that “makes us by far the largest photonics company. So that’s cool!” said Harris. The round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from existing investors Fidelity Management & Research Company and GV.

What’s next? In addition to interconnect, the company is developing new substrates for chips so that they can perform even more intimate, if you will, networking tasks using light.

Harris speculated that, apart from interconnect, power per chip is going to be the big differentiator going forward. “In 10 years you’ll have wafer-scale chips from everybody — there’s just no other way to improve the performance per chip,” he said. Cerebras is of course already working on this, though whether they are able to capture the true value of that advance at this stage of the technology is an open question.

But for Harris, seeing the chip industry coming up against a wall, he plans to be ready and waiting with the next step. “Ten years from now, interconnect is Moore’s Law,” he said.