🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #407

Wednesday's here - let's move one step closer to the weekend!

#Windows11 - So, Microsoft is gradually making the Windows OS into an agentic AI… but is warning users that if they don’t understand how to use it well, well, their “AI” may end up installing malware! Erm Hello Microsoft? We got to admit that even tech savvy people may fall into this trap.

#DownDetector - When people flocked to DownDetector[dot]com to check if Cloudflare was down, well, turns out DownDetector itself could not load - because they used Cloudflare themselves…!!

#AI-Startups - The big gossip in silicon valley is that startups that are attempting to raise VC money, specifically AI startups, are not using OpenAI or Gemini or Anthropic. They are all using Chinese models like Deepseek - because they cost 214x less per token.

#CoinbaseDataBreach - A user has claimed that Coinbase was aware of a data breach in their systems much before they actually announced to have discovered it.

Cloudflare Experiences Global Network Outage
Cloudflare, a leading internet infrastructure firm, is currently investigating a global network outage that's causing widespread "internal server error" messages on its services, affecting websites and online platforms worldwide. The outage is impacting multiple regions.

Vivo Beats Samsung To Become 2nd Biggest Smartphone Brand In India
The Indian smartphone market has seen significant growth, with Vivo overtaking Samsung to secure the second spot, while Apple achieved its highest-ever 10.4% share, leading the super-premium segment.

Indian Gaming Platforms Raided
Enforcement Directorate conducts searches on Gameskraft and WinZO, alleging manipulation of in-app algorithms and possible money laundering through cryptocurrencies, amid India's new gaming law ban on real-money online games.

Sequoia-backed Aspora Launches Bill Payment Feature For Non Resident Indians
Aspora, which lets the Indian diaspora send money back to India, is launching a new feature for users to pay bills. This means non-resident Indians (NRIs) can pay utility bills or recharge their mobile prepaid plans for their family. Until now, users had to either transfer the money to their Indian accounts or ask someone to handle the bills for them.

Game Awards 2025 Nominations Announced
The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony that recognizes outstanding achievements in the video game industry. Think of it like the Oscars for games, but for the gaming world.

Anthropic, Microsoft, And Nvidia Form Historic Partnership
Anthropic to scale Claude on Microsoft Azure, powered by NVIDIA. Anthropic has committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity. Microsoft and Anthropic are also expanding their existing partnership to provide broader access to Claude for businesses.

Google Gemini - Gemini 3 launched which combines all capabilities to bring any idea to life with state-of-the-art reasoning and multimodal understanding.

Snapchat - Introduces Topic Chats, a new public conversation feature for discussing trending topics and events.

Google WeatherNext 2 - Predicts hundreds of possible weather outcomes with unprecedented accuracy, including worst-case scenarios, in under a minute on a single TPU.

Grok - Version 4.1 launched - New State-of-the-Art General Capability with Improved Emotional Intelligence, Style Control, and Creative Writing Abilities.

Google Calendar - Users can now block off time on their calendar to work on a specific task.

Google Flights - AI powered search tool within Google Flights. Just describe where, when and how you’d like to travel - like you’re talking to a friend - and Flight Deals will use AI to understand what you’re looking for and show the best bargains available.

Perspective - an interactive analytics and data visualization component optimized for large and streaming datasets. It allows frontend developers to create high-performance reports and dashboards using its framework-agnostic Custom Element or React components. Powering its speed is a fast C++ query engine, compiled to WebAssembly for browser performance, with seamless integration for Python and JupyterLab environments.

Hashbrown - an open-source framework for building interfaces powered by language models. Create components that talk, adapt, and predict what comes next. Craft apps that are multi-lingual, accessible, and joyful to use.

Dark Pattern Games - a catalog that exposes manipulative design tactics in video games (such as "grind," "FOMO," and coercive monetization). It defines these "dark patterns" to educate players and developers on unethical design, fostering awareness and promoting user-centric, non-addictive game development and ethical UX.

Web Storage Options For Modern Web Applications
In this article, we'll explore the various technologies available for storing and querying data in a browser, including Cookies, localStorage, WebSQL, IndexedDB, OPFS, and SQLite via WebAssembly. We'll compare their features, limitations, and performance, and examine their use cases and history.

Google Is Killing The Open Web
Google is removing support for XSLT from Chrome. The company has not provided a solid justification for the move. The move is similar to Mozilla's decision to kill off RSS in Firefox.

Amazon And Flipkart Optimize Listings
Previously websites would work on their SEO to list at the top of search rankings. Now, e-commerce websites are optimizing their pages for visibility in LLMs that have agentic commerce capabilities.