Instead of paying iCloud or Dropbox more every month, get a 20TB cloud storage that stays with you for life.

The post This 20TB Cloud Storage Lifetime Subscription is on Sale for $350 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot. The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the […]

General Compute is betting on inference chips from outside the Nvidia ecosystem.

Google would certainly prefer that everyone used its Gemini models with Google Cloud services, but soon, you'll have more options. OpenAI and Google have come to an arrangement that will see the former's frontier models arrive in Google Cloud services. Perhaps more importantly, GPT models will soon appear in Antigravity, Google's agent-powered coding tool.

For enterprise customers and AI enthusiasts, OpenAI's latest model will appear in Google's "Model Garden" in the coming weeks, adding to its 200-plus options. The garden already offers access to Google's Gemini models, as well as an assortment of open models like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma. Anthropic's Claude AI has also been available for some time. Google says it's now the only large cloud provider offering access to all three leading closed LLMs.

While OpenAI notes that Microsoft continues to be its primary cloud partner, the full suite of current GPT 6 and 6.1 models—Astra, Sol, and Luna—will launch on Google Cloud. Astra will naturally cost the most to run, but Google's system supports dynamically moving workloads between LLMs based on performance, latency, and efficiency.

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OpenAI is bringing its models to Google Cloud's model garden and Antigravity coding tool, putting its technology on all three major U.S. cloud platforms after Microsoft's exclusive license ended earlier this year. "Google Cloud's longstanding investment in machine learning and AI has made it a destination for AI workloads and the developers and data scientists building them," OpenAI said in a blog post. It continues: [...] The integration will pair OpenAI's frontier models with Google Cloud's built-in access controls, centralized data governance, and high-performance infrastructure to support demanding enterprise workloads. Google Cloud customers will be able to purchase OpenAI frontier models via model garden, transacted through the Google Cloud Marketplace. Enterprises with Google Cloud spend commitments will be able to draw down their GCP commitments for these purchases. Additionally, OpenAI models will soon be available in Google Antigravity and the Gemini Agent, providing enterprise customers with model choice flexibility and the best model for each task. [...] For context, Microsoft previously held exclusive licensing rights to OpenAI's intellectual property, but that arrangement ended less than six months ago as OpenAI began expanding its partnerships with other cloud providers. Just one day after Microsoft's exclusivity ended, Amazon announced plans to host OpenAI's models on its cloud platform in April.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Salesforce's $5.66 billion Braze deal raises questions about pricing and integrations, while existing customer contracts remain unchanged.

The post Salesforce to Buy Braze for $5.66B — Contracts, Pricing and What Comes Next appeared first on TechRepublic.

Google Cloud’s London outage disrupted banking apps and business services. Learn what happened and what IT teams should check after service recovery.

The post Google Cloud London Outage Disrupts Banking and Business Services appeared first on TechRepublic.

Windows 11 Photos is getting a faster editor, improved viewer, and connected gallery. Here's what's changing and when the update arrives.

The post Windows 11 Photos Gets a 25% Faster Editor — Here’s Who Gets It First appeared first on TechRepublic.

"Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the company behind the [server-side] JavaScript and TypeScript runtime created by Ryan Dahl, the inventor of Node.js," Forbes reported last week. But Deno "has no future at Cloudflare, which will maintain the runtime for another year before ending its development," writes The Register. "That's OK with Dahl. 'I am now of the opinion that if you're choosing Node.js for building servers, you're doing it wrong,' Dahl told The Register." It all started with his team's work on the platform Deno Deploy, "We wanted to make running applications as straightforward as possible," Dahl wrote on the official Deno blog. "But building and operating Deploy also showed us how much complexity remained underneath that developer experience. I wanted to simplify that layer, too." This led to celld. Building on the Cloudflare Workers programming model, celld lets developers build distributed applications from the start while making the system simple to operate. What excites me greatly is that the scaling is built into the programming model, rather than infrastructure each app has to assemble itself.... We want to make this programming model the default way to build servers, whether you run on Cloudflare's network or your own infrastructure. Joining also means choosing where to focus our effort... Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development. Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down. We will provide migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers. [Deno's JSR package registry for JavaScript and TypeScript] will continue operating, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare. Forbes argues that this acquisition of Deno "turns a long-standing objection to Cloudflare Workers, the claim that applications built on it cannot easily leave, into a selling point." For CIOs evaluating serverless and edge platforms, portability now has a concrete answer... Released in August, [celld] is a single Rust binary that runs Workers and Durable Objects across many machines, with object storage as its only external dependency. Operators run multiple celld instances against one storage bucket, and the software handles placement, routing and persistence. Dahl and Belder will now lead an effort to merge celld into workerd and make self-hosting a supported way to run Workers applications. With this, customers can build an application on Cloudflare's network and move it to a private data center without rewriting it. "With Deno, we improved the experience of writing JavaScript," Dahl argues on the Cloudflare blog, "but we didn't fundamentally change what developers had to assemble around the runtime. The bigger problems are around networked applications: distributing computation, coordinating state, data storage in general, and autoscaling to meet demand..." Could the programming model make partitioning across machines part of the design from the start? The solution clicked into focus when I read about Cloudflare's Durable Objects. It provided a very powerful abstraction: the distributed singleton with a SQLite database. Each Durable Object is like a small, individually addressable server with its own relational database. Its JavaScript execution is single-threaded (which is easy to reason about), it handles WebSockets, and its local SQLite database can be accessed synchronously. By building a chat application using one Durable Object per channel, you have sharded your data and WebSocket connections, and thus made your application scalable... What excites me is the leverage this model gives developers: compute, relational databases, queues, and real-time communication primitives designed for applications distributed across machines. Now Dahl and 12 of his Deno colleagues "will work to build out Cloudflare's Workers platform," explains The Register, "expanding it for potential open-source use. He feels this approach is the way to go." "Right now, every other server is really operating at the Linux VM layer. That is not what Cloudflare Workers are," he said... The ever-fickle Dahl first debuted Deno in 2018 as a rewrite of Node. The name 'Deno' is an anagram of Node, and it was Dahl's attempt to fix everything he felt he got wrong with Node — built-in fetch, a permission model, native TypeScript support et al. Sequoia backed Dahl's company for $21 million in 2022, and as of August, Deno amassed 400,000 monthly users. Nonetheless, Node's gravity proved too heavy for Deno to achieve escape velocity. "What we found over years of working on Deno is that you can't really deviate from Node.js very much," Dahl told The Register. "As we continued to try to get adoption for Deno, we found we had to essentially backpedal on some of the original promises and become more Node compatible over time, and that left us as a kind of an alternative Node.js implementation." Going forward, Cloudflare will supply Deno with bug fixes and security patches for the next year, while Dahl looks for a new home for the MIT-licensed open source project. Dahl's worked could bring "yet another revolutionary turn for server-side JavaScript," the article argues, "offering a runtime that would require only 300 KB of memory per instance, rather than the hundreds of megabytes now required for Node/Deno. Such savings could quickly add up for a cloud provider, especially one serving the voracious agentic market." And as Dahl wrote on the Deno blog, "The need for better abstractions is especially acute with AI. Durable Objects bring together capabilities that are particularly useful for agent harnesses: inexpensive, serverless execution, persistent state, WebSockets, and a high-level JavaScript interface. This is what I'm most excited to explore and why celld focuses on Durable Objects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seattle-area startups raised $3.5 billion in venture capital in the third quarter, the most in any quarter going back at least a decade, led by big rounds for Kent-based rocket maker Stoke Space, Bellevue developer platform Temporal and Everett fusion company Helion.

That’s more than triple the $1 billion raised in the region in the same quarter a year earlier, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. It’s also more than $1 billion above the previous quarterly high of about $2.4 billion, reached in late 2018 and again in late 2022.

Most of the money went to a handful of companies building physical things: rockets, satellites, spacecraft and fusion power plants. Three space companies in the region raised $1.6 billion combined: Stoke, Redmond-based Starcloud and Seattle’s Hubble Network.

Nationally, the trend went the other way. U.S. venture funding fell 40% from the prior quarter, to $98.4 billion, as the giant rounds for frontier AI labs that drove the first half of the year tapered off.

Seattle ranked seventh among U.S. metro areas for venture dollars in the quarter. The Bay Area led with $40.7 billion, followed by Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Boston and Denver. Denver’s $4.2 billion came largely from a single $3.9 billion round for AI data center developer Crusoe.

By number of deals, Seattle ranked eighth, with 94.

The total includes Helion’s $500 million round, which the company announced in June but PitchBook counts in the third quarter. Even without it, the quarter would still be the region’s biggest on record.

Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud has signed up to send its artificial intelligence data-processing hardware into lunar orbit on a Firefly Aerospace spacecraft.

Starcloud’s payload, known as SC-1L, will fly on Firefly’s Elytra orbital vehicle during a NASA-supported mission that’s scheduled for launch no earlier than 2028. The mission will demonstrate technologies that Starcloud plans to use on AI data centers in Earth orbit — and around the moon as well.

“Space is the future of data centers, and the moon is the next frontier for that vision,” Ezra Feilden, Starcloud’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said today in a news release.

Starcloud made its mark in Earth orbit last year with Starcloud-1, a satellite equipped with an Nvidia H100 chip. Starcloud-1 successfully trained a large language model called NanoGPT, marking a first for orbital computing. “We successfully validated our ability to run and train AI models on enterprise-grade GPUs in low Earth orbit, and now we’re taking this proven technology to lunar orbit,” Feilden said.

Starcloud’s SC-1L payload will be integrated aboard the Elytra vehicle for a mission aimed at delivering Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander to a lunar region known as the Gruithuisen Domes. After the lander separates from Elytra and descends to the surface, the orbiting vehicle will serve as a data relay for Blue Ghost.

The data-processing demonstration begins when the Blue Ghost mission ends. SC-1L will ingest data from Elytra’s onboard Solux vision system, execute high-performance AI computing in orbit and transmit the processed data back to Earth.

The Solux system is designed to serve as an autonomous navigation and tracking tool in space environments where global positioning systems are otherwise unavailable. Firefly expects the Elytra orbiter to operate in lunar orbit for at least five years.

“We’re proud to collaborate with innovative customers like Starcloud and collectively take another step toward establishing the infrastructure that will power a permanent human and robotic presence at the moon,” said Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s vice president of spacecraft.

Elytra will also use high-resolution telescopes and Firefly’s Ocula moon imaging service for surface mapping, mineral detection and reconnaissance. Firefly recently announced a collaboration with Nvidia to process the data for Ocula using Nvidia’s Jetson module.

In August, Starcloud reported raising $250 million in funding to support the creation of a constellation of AI data-center satellites in low Earth orbit, powered by Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin Module. Starcloud has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to operate as many as 88,000 satellites as orbital data centers.

Apple is expanding its iCloud+ bundles in more than 100 countries, adding services like Apple Arcade and Apple TV+ to its cloud storage plans.

The post Apple’s iCloud+ Now Includes Apple Arcade, Apple TV, And More In Over 100 Countries first appeared on Redmond Pie.

Protection against unauthorized remote logins to your cloud server is a matter of SSH key-based authentication,...

The post How to Secure Remote Access to Your Cloud Server in 2026 appeared first on Fossbytes.