What's On Tap For Google's Big Conference This Week: Expect Watches, Virtual Reality, And A Mystery Bluetooth Device (goog)

Two credit cards make it easy to pay for housing and earn rewards. Just make sure to pay your balance off each month.

When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network’s Junos OS has been doing just that. J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access.

Four out of five game developers are currently working on a project for the PC, a sizable increase from 66 percent of developers a year ago. That's according to Informa's latest State of the Game Industry survey, which partnered with Omdia to ask over 3,000 game industry professionals about their work in advance of March's Game Developers Conference. The 80 percent of developers working on PC projects in this year's survey is by far the highest mark for any platform dating back to at least 2018, when 60 percent of surveyed developers were working on a PC game.

On Thursday, OpenAI released a research preview of "Operator," a web automation tool that uses a new AI model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA) to control computers through a visual interface. The system performs tasks by viewing and interacting with on-screen elements like buttons and text fields similar to how a human would. Operator is available today for subscribers of the $200 per month ChatGPT Pro plan at operator.chatgpt.com.

The investigation will look for "potential exploitative conduct" by the tech companies, which dominate the mobile market.

All federal agencies received a memo Wednesday requiring the termination of remote work options, with return-to-office plans due by end of day Friday. In the memo, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, Charles Ezell, told the heads and acting heads of all departments and agencies that the change is due to Donald Trump's Return to In-Person Work presidential memorandum, which carved out space for some exemptions and ordered: Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary. Empty offices a “national embarrassment” According to the memo, "most federal offices presently are virtually abandoned," with "the vast majority of federal office workers" having "not returned to in-person work" after transitioning to remote work during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.