technology 24 for you

Monday, August 24, 2026

Inaudible sounds used to fingerprint browsers catch AliExpress red-handed

Chinese retailer AliExpress has been caught fingerprinting visitors after one of the metrics—an outdated technique that measures inaudible sounds it sends to browsers—impeded a researcher's ability to use his bluetooth headphones. Researcher Matthew Callaghan <a href="https://blog.laserphile.com/2026/08/aliexpress-webpage-keeping-multipoint.html">said</a> he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone stopped playing over his multipoint headphones, which accept connections from more than one device at a time. He set the headphones to play sounds from his phone except when his PC was producing audio. Each time he loaded AliExpress, the phone audio stopped. Each time he closed the tab the site was loaded into, the phone was once again audible. <h2>Users can't hear it, but browsers can</h2> While investigating the odd behavior, Callaghan said he found two highly obfuscated scripts. Together, they rendered a graph that analyzed the <a href="https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/OfflineAudioContext/explainer.md">WebAudio</a> readings of each visiting browser. This graph acted as an oscillator that measured <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawtooth_wave">Sawtooth waves</a>, which are common in output from digital audio.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/aliexpress-caught-fingerprinting-visitors-after-sending-inaudible-sounds-to-browsers/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/aliexpress-caught-fingerprinting-visitors-after-sending-inaudible-sounds-to-browsers/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/Wo5dlUK

Building Technology People Can Trust

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/stacked-green-printed-circuit-boards-with-electronic-components-on-a-work-surface.jpg?id=67598440&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C260%2C0%2C261"/> This article is brought to you by <a href="https://www.emerson.com/en/corporate" target="_blank">Emerson</a>.I’ve spent much of my career as an engineer, including years in the semiconductor industry. And one lesson has stayed with me through every major technology shift: innovation always creates new complexity.In semiconductors, we have seen that repeatedly. Every generation has delivered breakthroughs in performance and capability, but each step forward made it harder to understand system behavior. What used to be easy to validate on the component level with a test bench now needs a much wider view. <img alt="Smiling woman with curly hair in black blazer posing at a table against plain background" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="21444500c0ecccd464d7236ab01f4cca" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="1b4da" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/smiling-woman-with-curly-hair-in-black-blazer-posing-at-a-table-against-plain-background.png?id=67603478&width=980"/> “The future of engineering will be defined by who can verify, understand, and improve complex systems fast enough to safely keep innovation moving forward,” says Ritu Favre, President of Emerson’s Test & Measurement business group.EmersonChiplet-based designs are a prime example. A chiplet from one supplier, an interposer from another, and a packaging process from a third may all perform perfectly on their own. Yet there is a chance for unexpected behavior when you put them together in a system. More and more often, the hardest engineering challenges are not in the individual components themselves. The problems are found when we start to combine components and have them interact with each other.These challenges extend far beyond semiconductors. Products are becoming more software-defined and dependent on interactions across different technologies and environments. Think about the interactions needed for a modern car using adaptive cruise control on a bumpy road in a rainstorm. Or a passenger jet adjusting wing flaps and engine speeds in turbulent weather to maintain safety and stability. Both the car and the jet are being guided by complex computer systems with thousands of sensors leading to thousands of interactions every second. And in many cases, there are multiple computer systems working together. We are building systems of remarkable capability but understanding how they will act under real-world conditions is getting harder.That is why I believe we are entering a new era of test. The defining challenge of modern engineering is no longer simply what we can design and build. It is what we can confidently verify.<h2>Rethinking the Role of Test</h2>In this new era, test can’t be an afterthought. For decades, test was treated as the final checkpoint before release. Design teams developed a product, test teams validated performance, and organizations looked for a final pass/fail to determine whether they were ready to move forward. That model worked fine when systems were more self-contained and predictable. Today, that approach can lead to more risk.I believe we are entering a new era of test. The defining challenge of modern engineering is no longer simply what we can design and build. It is what we can confidently verify.Many of the delays and fire drills we face come from issues that were not visible early enough. Problems discovered late in development are more difficult to diagnose, more expensive to fix, and more likely to get you off schedule. The solution is not more testing at the end. The solution is to make test and verification part of the engineering workflow from the start.When validation is integrated throughout development, teams catch problems early when change is easier. Test also stops being a barrier to release. Instead, it becomes a source of insight, helping us understand how systems behave as they become more connected.<h2>Why Connected Platforms Matter</h2>When confidently verifying technology becomes the key challenge, the tools we choose take on a different level of importance. The tools have a direct impact on how quickly we can diagnose a problem and keep moving forward. In an environment where technology changes rapidly, disconnected tools get in the way of progress. Modern test strategy requires linking information across design, validation, and production, turning measurement data into decisions made quickly enough to keep pace with innovation.This reminds me of when EDA was first introduced. Before it came along, engineers spent much of their time hand-drawing circuit layouts and placing transistors. EDA eliminated that tedious work by letting teams describe complex behavior in high-level code. It enabled them to focus on overall architecture instead.A connected test platform does a similar thing for validation. Because a platform can adapt and scale alongside technology, it cuts down on maintenance and downtime, keeping teams from having to rebuild their workflows from scratch as requirements change.<h2>Grounding AI in Engineering Reality</h2>Today, AI is rapidly entering the engineering toolkit to accelerate design and analysis. But in test and measurement, AI cannot reach its potential in isolation.An AI model is only as effective as the data feeding it. Without context, even the smartest algorithm will struggle to tell the difference between normal hardware variance and a critical failure. A connected platform supplies the structured, traceable data stream AI requires to deliver real insight.AI can correlate complex multi-system interactions, flag unexpected behavior, and direct an engineer’s attention right at the root cause.When measurement data flows seamlessly across the workstream, AI moves from being a standalone tool to an active layer of intelligence. It can correlate complex multi-system interactions, flag unexpected behavior, and direct an engineer’s attention right at the root cause.Every technology shift that accelerates how fast we create new designs also increases the complexity we must verify. AI can help teams keep pace with that complexity. Not by replacing human judgment, but by giving engineers the context we need to act with confidence.<h2>Innovation Demands Confidence</h2>Ultimately, the goal of modern platforms and AI-enabled workflows is to help technical teams spend more time building new things and solving hard problems. Most of us didn’t choose this profession to spend our time searching for data or dealing with last minute surprises. We want to innovate and integrating test directly into development provides a better view of system behavior, allowing teams to focus on that innovation rather than managing complexity.The future of engineering will not be defined by who can build the most advanced product or technology. It will be defined by who can verify, understand, and improve complex systems fast enough to safely keep innovation moving forward.That is the new era of test. As the pace of innovation accelerates, every breakthrough creates new paths to failure, and test is how engineers find those failures before the real world does. In an increasingly complex world, that capability is becoming as important as innovation itself.Innovation has always required great engineering. And now, more than ever, it also requires confidence. Confidence that comes from knowing that we are not only building what is possible, but we are also building technology that people can trust. Reference: https://ift.tt/EzKtmxR

Poetry for Engineers: Safe Distance

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/conceptual-illustration-of-two-fiber-optic-cables-pointing-in-opposite-directions-with-each-one-inside-a-differently-colored-bu.jpg?id=67652120&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C1"/> <h3></h3> How do I touch you across the ocean, across cold depths where light travels through glass.Not copper—fibers. Optical. Through liquid glass, through flickering light that carries you in fragments. Light broken into pulses. You say: it’s easier this way. What are we missing like this? You smile. Safe distance. I say: network. Signals slide beneath the sea, through cables thinner than trust, faster than touch, slower than longing. We stand alone, together. Synchronous, yet apart. Icons replace skin, latency replaces breath. This distance protects us. Silence that feels intentional. Everything is under control as long as nothing truly hurts. And we choose it because it shields us from what we might become if we actually met. You are my counterpoint. My response. My reflection at a safe distance. Beneath the ocean, nodes remember paths. Packets shake hands without bodies. If we get lost, we resend everything, with error, with noise, with hope. Reference: https://ift.tt/3vr2oi5

Sunday, August 23, 2026

This IEEE Senior Member Develops AI Tools for E-Commerce Sites

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-professionally-dressed-indian-man-smiling-with-a-trophy-in-one-hand-and-an-award-certificate-in-the-other.jpg?id=67657769&width=1200&height=800&coordinates=0%2C83%2C0%2C84"/> <a href="https://balajiingole.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Balaji Ingole</a> rarely saw televisions while growing up in Udgir, India. No one in the small Maharashtra village had computers or phones. Only one household owned a television, and neighbors often gathered there to watch shows together.Ingole never even saw a computer growing up. It wasn’t until he reached middle school that he encountered a computer lab, an experience he says changed his life. Almost immediately, he says, the machine felt like a window into a different scale of possibility for him.<h3>Balaji Ingole</h3> Employer Amla Commerce in MilwaukeeTitle Project managerMember grade Senior memberAlma maters COEP Technological University and Welingkar Institute of Management, both in India“I was very studious and not very social, always reading or solving problems in a math textbook,” he says. “At the computer lab, I began learning the <a href="https://www.c-language.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">C programming language</a>—which was like discovering a whole new world. I was fascinated that you could create something with just a few lines of code.”His early interest grew into a self-directed education. Outside of Ingole’s formal classwork, he taught himself to build database-backed applications, wire up hardware, write software, and trace error logs.Today the IEEE senior member similarly splits his time. During the week, he’s a project manager in Milwaukee at B2B e-commerce company <a href="https://www.amla.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amla</a>, leading AI-driven digital transformation initiatives to help the company’s clients boost their sales. On weekends, he leads a similarly demanding life as an independent researcher. His current projects include developing AI-enabled health care diagnostic tools and assistive technologies to support people with physical disabilities.“I believe in ‘learn by doing,’” he says. “I really like to test my knowledge and prototype ideas to find out if they truly work.”<h2>A college project becomes an inspiration</h2>Ingole’s tendency to go beyond his coursework continued after he graduated high school in 2004. As a mechanical engineering undergraduate at <a href="https://www.coeptech.ac.in/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The College of Engineering, Pune (now COEP Technological University)</a>, in India, he participated in several extracurricular activities. One was interviewing entrepreneurs and writing about them for The COEP College Magazine. The experience helped him gain confidence, he says, giving him the push he needed to pursue interviews for the publication with two Indian entrepreneurs he admired: <a href="https://www.infosys.com/about/management-profiles/narayana-murthy.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">N.R. Narayana Murthy</a>, cofounder of IT giant <a href="https://www.infosys.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Infosys</a>; and his wife, philanthropist <a href="https://sudhamurty.in/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sudha Murty</a>. The Murtys cofounded the <a href="https://www.infosys.org/infosys-foundation.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Infosys Foundation</a>, a nonprofit that runs educational, health care, women’s empowerment, and sustainability <a href="https://www.infosys.org/infosys-foundation/initiatives.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">programs</a> in underserved areas of India.“Every week I would fax them: ‘Please give me an interview time,’” Ingole says. Eventually, Sudha Murty’s office offered him a phone interview, but he requested to meet her in person at Infosys’s Bengaluru offices. She agreed, but the offices were 940 kilometers from Pune, and he didn’t have the money to travel or stay overnight in a hotel.Ingole and a classmate borrowed money from friends and traveled through the night on multiple buses and trains to get to Bengaluru. They freshened up in a public bathroom before heading to the Infosys campus to meet Murty.Impressed by their persistence, she surprised them by also arranging a brief chat with Narayana Murthy.“Narayana Murthy handwrote a personal message to the engineering students of [my college]—which we proudly published in our college magazine,” Ingole says. “In his note, Murthy shared that we are at an extraordinary moment in India’s history and that the future looks even brighter. His words encouraged us to work hard and make the most of this time.“I still have that note,” Ingole says. “They are billionaires, and I was just a regular student. The fact that they took the time to do this really motivated me.”During the final semester of his engineering studies, Ingole joined the <a href="https://in.linkedin.com/company/tata-research-development-and-design-centre-trddc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tata Research Design and Development Center</a> in Pune for a six-month internship. After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2008, he became a graduate engineering trainee at <a href="https://automation.honeywell.com/us/en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Honeywell Automation</a> in Pune.He left the company in 2009, and during the next 13 years, he held different software engineering and project management positions at IT companies across India.He earned a master’s degree in business administration from the <a href="https://www.welingkar.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai,</a> in 2017.In 2022 he accepted a project-manager role at <a href="https://marssg.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mars IT Solutions in Madison, Wisc.</a> The following year, he left to join <a href="https://www.gainwelltechnologies.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gainwell Technologies</a>, also in Madison, as a senior project manager. At Gainwell, he managed projects for the core IT systems multiple U.S. state health departments use to administer <a href="https://www.medicaid.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Medicaid</a> benefits, manage provider enrollment, and verify member eligibility. The experience managing projects that directly enabled patients’ access to health care gave Ingole a special appreciation for and interest in this area, he says.“Health care data is not like other data,” he says. “The stakes are high, compliance requirements are different, and the margin for error is effectively zero.”Ingole says he enjoyed the rigor of data governance combined with the potential to positively impact lives, and that also applies to his current work at Amla.<h2>Agentic AI in e-commerce</h2>Ingole joined Amla in July 2025. He helps manufacturers and B2B customers modernize their <a data-linked-post="2650248208" href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/who-invented-ecommerce" target="_blank">e-commerce</a> operations. He also builds AI tools for them and for his internal team.For Amla’s customers, he’s developing AI-enabled chatbots that help manufacturers set up and manage large product catalogs in e‑commerce platforms. Such product setup traditionally has been a manual, tedious, error-prone process: Companies upload thousands of products, adjust item names, enter prices, update images, and more.“Product setup has been one of the most painful processes in e-commerce, and it can take [our] customers two to three months to complete,” Ingole says. “We’re creating an AI agent that will guide them, step-by-step, to get everything set up in two weeks.”Ingole relies on AI agents for some of his own tasks at Amla. Project managers historically have spent 10 to 12 hours each week assembling and sending status reports to stakeholders. Ingole built an AI agent to handle much of the work.“It runs every Monday morning and reads through my emails to extract highlights, risks, timelines, and upcoming releases, then sends me a written status report,” Ingole says. The process might sound simple, but the agent’s workflow involves at least a dozen steps including defining parameters, managing temporary files, and integrating with existing tools.With the information-gathering work handled, it frees up Ingole and his colleagues to spend more time on deeper-thinking work, he says.<h2>Publishing as idea refinery</h2>For nearly a decade, Ingole has spent some of his free time conducting independent research projects in data analytics and AI-enabled applications in health care. He has written <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/790405442038687" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">more than 40 peer-reviewed papers</a>, which are in the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/free-access-to-thousands-of-covid19-research-documents" target="_self">IEEE Xplore Digital Library</a>. He has been granted six patents in the United Kingdom and India. In the U.K., he is a registered coinventor of an AI-powered, cloud-connected <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388234716_AI-POWERED_CLOUD-CONNECTED_WEARABLE_DEVICE_FOR_PERSONALIZED_HEALTH_MONITORING" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wearable device for health monitoring</a> and an <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389874948_AI-BASED_BREAST_CANCER_DETECTION_DEVICE" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">AI-based breast cancer detection tool</a>.Ingole’s patent for the breast cancer detector, he says, reflects his belief that when engineers apply data and AI correctly, they can help doctors diagnose patients more quickly and accurately.That, he says, is both a power and a responsibility.He is part of a team helping patients who are paralyzed and nonverbal control items in their environment. His goal, he says, is to develop a brain-computer interface to let patients turn on a fan, switch off a television, and complete similar tasks.Publishing research requires both academic rigor and peer scrutiny, and Ingole says the function has been critical to improving as both a project manager and a researcher-inventor.“Lots of research ideas never make it to paper,” he notes. “But when you write for journals or conferences, you’re bombarded with questions from Ph.D.s and experienced researchers. This forces me to refine my methodology, and to combine use cases and technical architecture in a way that stands up to expert review.”<h2>Finding a professional hub</h2>Ingole joined IEEE in 2022, and he says the affiliation has become central to both his research and his professional identity.“I use the <a href="https://cis.ieee.org/activities/membership-activities/ieee-member-directory" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Member Directory</a> often and contact engineers through my IEEE email address, which gives me credibility because they know it’s a genuine research connection,” he says.The organization has given him a platform to contribute to the research space beyond his own papers, he says. He has served as a conference session chair, keynote speaker, technical program committee member, and peer research reviewer for various conferences and events. His IEEE membership, he says, has opened doors to other communities, helping support his entry into the <a href="https://www.bcs.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">British Computer Society</a>, which has stringent acceptance criteria.Those opportunities have helped him build a global network of collaborators with whom to discuss upcoming research, seek advice, and share data, he says.“IEEE is important for me to continue as an independent researcher,” he says. “It lets me contribute to the community, and I get a lot in return.” Reference: https://ift.tt/MO6RBwH

Friday, August 21, 2026

Stop Hunting, Start Solving: Accelerating Root Cause Analysis with Agentic AI

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/spotfire-logo-with-circular-icon-and-stylized-black-text.png?id=67657308&width=980"/> About this WebinarTurn Yield Excursions into Faster, More Confident Root Cause AnalysisWhen a yield issue emerges, the answer rarely lives in a single system. Critical clues are spread across metrology data, tool traces, chemical analysis, and facilities systems, while growing data volumes make traditional dashboards slow, fragmented, and difficult to act on.What You’ll Learn:Discover how a purpose-built semiconductor analytics platform can help engineers connect insights across domains without moving data. See how Agentic AI, semiconductor-specific visualizations, and push-down compute enable faster investigation of yield excursions and process issues, even across billions of data points. In the session, a live demonstration shows how to conduct a multi-domain root cause investigation using Spotfire® Industry Pro.Key Takeaways:<ul><li>Understand why siloed manufacturing data delays yield recovery and inflates costs</li><li>Learn how Agentic AI automates complex cross-domain analytics and visualization generation</li><li>Explore methods for scaling high-performance analytics across massive fab datasets</li></ul>Who Should Attend:Yield, Process, and Integration Engineers; Fab and Manufacturing Operations Managers; Quality and Reliability Engineers; and Data & Analytics leaders supporting wafer fabs, foundries, OSATs, and IDMs who need to identify issues faster while maintaining confidence in decision-making.Save Your Spot!Join this webinar to learn how leading semiconductor teams are accelerating root cause investigations, scaling analytics across massive datasets, and transforming disconnected data into actionable manufacturing intelligence. Reserve your seat today.<a href="https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/5460332/DAFEFF7A68EE900DEA7A14356089B553?utm_source=IEEE&utm_medium=site&utm_campaign=922" target="_blank">Register now for this free webinar!</a> Reference: https://ift.tt/dEvY8Hb

Waymo doubles spending on lobbying in robotaxi battle with Uber

Waymo has sharply increased its lobbying spending as it seeks to persuade US regulators to clear a path for fully autonomous taxi services, intensifying its battle with rival Uber over the future of robotaxis. The Alphabet-owned company spent more than $1 million between April and June on lobbying the federal government, more than double its outlay a year earlier, according to filings. That put Waymo’s spending close to Uber’s and well ahead of rivals including Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla. The rise in lobbying comes as Waymo and Uber push competing visions for the future of ride-hailing. Waymo wants a faster route to fully driverless commercial services, while Uber is advocating a staggered rollout in which robotaxis operate alongside human drivers.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/waymo-doubles-spending-on-lobbying-in-robotaxi-battle-with-uber/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/waymo-doubles-spending-on-lobbying-in-robotaxi-battle-with-uber/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/eoRZbrt

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Earlier this week, researchers outlined an attack that used a secret input provided by Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise to cause the AI assistant to exfiltrate a password present in the user’s inbox. Now, a separate team has devised a similar attack against Grok. The new data theft hack employs a deceptively simple trick to force the Elon Musk-owned LLM to steal user chats and other personal information. At the time this post went live, the assistant continued to cough up the data, despite xAI being informed of it in June. The lesson from both this week’s episodes—and the countless other ones that have come before it—is that LLMs are incapable of solving the root causes for prompt injections, the most severe vulnerability classes they’re most prone to. That leaves AI developers with no other option but to build a guardrail that steers the model away from the harmful actions. As I noted in <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/microsoft-copilot-reveals-secret-input-that-allowed-it-to-be-hacked/">Tuesday’s story</a>, the approach is tantamount to a road traffic safety engineer erecting a protective rail around a dangerous bend rather than banking the curve. <h2>Cryptographic Context Injection in the house</h2> Prompt injections exploit LLMs' training to comply with user requests whenever possible. Attackers can capitalize on the predilection by smuggling harmful instructions into emails or webpages the assistant is instructed to summarize. Because LLMs can’t reliably distinguish between content in an email sent by an untrusted party and user instructions entered directly into a prompt, the overly solicitous LLM faithfully follows them. To date, Grok and other LLMs' only recourse is to create guardrails that flag suspicious instructions and forbid them from being executed.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/grok-exfiltrates-user-data-when-malicious-instructions-are-encrypted/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/grok-exfiltrates-user-data-when-malicious-instructions-are-encrypted/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/WQhPU5L