Scam compounds across Southeast Asia are using AI, malware, and automation to scale fraud, forcing APAC security teams to rethink phishing, identity, and mobile-risk controls.

The post Southeast Asia Scam Compounds Turn AI Into a Cybersecurity Threat appeared first on TechRepublic.

This week, I recorded from Boston - sorry for the appearance. We covered the Google May 2026 core update rolling out. Google Search Console released to a few new AI performance reports and new AI controls. Bing...

After tons and tons of testing and tweaking, Google is officially announcing what it calls Search profiles and what I called Discover publisher pages. Google said Search profiles provide "a central place to showcase their latest articles, videos and social posts."

Microsoft emailed advertisers notifying them that Microsoft Advertising will update UTM auto-tagging beginning on September 2, 2026. Microsoft added that no action is required on your part, as the updated tags will be applied automatically.

Google will soon allow you to connect your Google Business Profile with Google Analytics. Google sent out an email to some businesses saying this is coming soon, within the next "few weeks."

With the rise of Google Ads accounts being hijacked, Google has updated its Account security and safety help document with more details on passkeys and the security agent feature. This is in addition to a number of changes Google made recently around ad account security.

About five months ago (I missed it), Google began asking searchers if the business location they are visited offers rewards in exchange for reviews. The prompt that comes up in the app asks, "Does this business offer rewards in exchange for reviews?"

Google Pay is evolving for "agentic commerce" by introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol and a new MCP server that allows AI agents to manage integrations and analyze trends. New Android updates introduce dynamic callbacks for seamless express checkouts and extend payment support into social media apps via WebViews. Additionally, the platform is launching cross-device biometric authentication and new transaction signals to help merchants reduce friction and optimize processing costs.

Genkit is an open-source framework designed to help developers build production-ready, agentic AI applications using TypeScript, Go, Dart, and Python. The framework utilizes a powerful middleware system that intercepts generation calls to inject custom behaviors like retries, model fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop tool approvals. By attaching hooks at the generate, model, and tool layers, developers can ensure high reliability and deterministic control over model outputs. Furthermore, Genkit allows for the creation and stacking of custom middleware, all of which can be inspected and debugged through a dedicated Developer UI.

How to transition from stateless chatbots to production-grade agents capable of managing long-running enterprise workflows, such as HR onboarding, that span days or weeks. It introduces the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and its architectural shifts, specifically using durable state machines and persistent session storage to ensure an agent never loses context during "idle time" or server restarts. By leveraging event-driven webhooks and multi-agent delegation, the tutorial demonstrates how to build resilient systems that "sleep" during pauses and wake up to resume complex tasks with high reasoning accuracy.

Integration of Arm Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2) and the Google AI Edge software stack enables high-performance, on-device generative AI by turning the CPU into a powerful matrix-compute accelerator. Using Stability AI’s "stable-audio-open-small" model as a case study, it outlines a streamlined "Convert, Optimize, and Deploy" pipeline that utilizes LiteRT, XNNPACK, and KleidiAI to automate hardware acceleration. The resulting implementation achieves over a 2x speedup in audio generation and a 4x reduction in memory usage while maintaining high audio quality on Arm-powered mobile devices and laptops.

Google Cloud has introduced a high-performance integration that connects Rapid Storage directly to PyTorch via the fsspec interface to eliminate AI training bottlenecks. By utilizing Google’s Colossus architecture and bidirectional gRPC streaming, the solution offers up to 15 TiB/s aggregate throughput and significant reductions in latency. These improvements allow developers to speed up total training time by 23% with zero code changes required beyond updating the storage bucket type.

Apple says macOS 26 Tahoe is the last major release for Intel Macs, with Rosetta support continuing through macOS 27 before narrowing.

The post Apple Begins Rosetta’s Final Phase as Intel Mac Era Winds Down appeared first on TechRepublic.

A github.dev flaw could let attackers steal GitHub OAuth tokens through a one-click attack, exposing private repositories and codebases.

The post New GitHub Zero-Day Exposed Developer Tokens to Attackers appeared first on TechRepublic.

Gartner SRM 2026 put resilience, identity, and AI agent governance at the center of cybersecurity strategy as prevention loses ground.

The post Gartner SRM 2026 Signals a Cybersecurity Shift From Prevention to Resilience appeared first on TechRepublic.

Google is reportedly offering select Play Store developers payment for access to app source code. For Android developers in APAC, the offer raises questions about IP rights, security risks, AI-use terms, and local data obligations before signing.

The post Google Reportedly Wants Android App Code From Play Store Developers appeared first on TechRepublic.

AI toys are being marketed as educational companions, but researchers warn that privacy rules, safety testing, and child-development evidence are still lagging behind the market.

The post AI Toys Reach Children Before Privacy and Safety Rules Catch Up appeared first on TechRepublic.

A debug flag left active in six Microsoft 365 Android apps allowed another installed app on the same device to request account tokens without user interaction.

The post Microsoft 365 Android Apps Had a Token Flaw IT Teams Should Check Now appeared first on TechRepublic.

DuckDuckGo’s new No AI search extensions make AI-free search easier to set as a browser default, giving users a persistent alternative to AI-generated search results.

The post DuckDuckGo Makes AI-Free Search Easier To Set as Default appeared first on TechRepublic.

US firms are testing China’s DeepSeek as Silicon Valley AI costs rise, raising questions about savings, data residency, and risk.

The post US Firms Try DeepSeek as Silicon Valley AI Costs Rise appeared first on TechRepublic.