Feed aggregator

• HP Threat Insights Report reveals new malware campaigns
• Victims have their data exfiltrated by a remote access trojan
• Attackers have been observed using fake CAPTCHA verification pages

New research has claimed victims are increasingly infecting themselves with malware thanks to a surge in fake CAPTCHA verification tests - taking advantage of a growing ‘click tolerance’ as users are increasingly accustomed to ‘jumping through hoops to authenticate themselves online.’

This isn’t the first report to flag this attack, with security researchers identifying fake CAPTCHA pages spreading infostealer malware in late 2024, but HP’s latest Threat Insights Report now warns this is on the rise.

Users were commonly directed to attacker-controlled websites, and then pushed to complete convincing but fake authentication challenges.

More campaigns identified

These false CAPTCHAs usually trick users into running malicious PowerShell commands on their device that install a Lumma Stealer remote access trojan - a popular infostealer capable of exfiltrating a wide range of sensitive information, like browser details, email credentials, client data, and even cryptocurrency wallets.

Fake CAPTCHA spreading wasn’t the only threat uncovered, with attackers also able to access end-users webcams and microphones in concerning attacks spread via social engineering attacks, primarily using open source RAT and XenoRat to control devices, exfiltrate data, and log keystrokes.

Alongside this, attackers were observed delivering malicious JavaScript code “inside Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) images to evade detection”. These images are opened “by default” in browsers, and the embedded code is executed, “offering redundancy and monetization opportunities for the attacker” thanks to the remote access tools.

"A common thread across these campaigns is the use of obfuscation and anti-analysis techniques to slow down investigations," said Patrick Schläpfer, Principal Threat Researcher in the HP Security Lab.

“Even simple but effective defence evasion techniques can delay the detection and response of security operations teams, making it harder to contain an intrusion. By using methods like direct system calls, attackers make it tougher for security tools to catch malicious activity, giving them more time to operate undetected – and compromise victims endpoints."

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Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad review

The Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad is an affordable laptop cooling pad, designed to prevent your laptop from overheating during heavy gaming sessions or creative workflows. Given its price point, it would be reasonable to assume you’ll get only moderate-weight cooling. But blow me down: its three 100mm fans, two 80mm fans and one 70mm fan help you secure some pretty cool running.

I ran it through the 3DMark Stress Test on our Acer Predator Helios 300 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, and the cooling it offered was genuinely pretty glacial. After running 15 minutes of running, the temperature of the laptop had risen from 22.2ºC to only 37.5ºC. That’s a temperature rise of just 15.3ºC – and, in the time I've been testing laptop pads, is the most extreme cooling I’ve seen. It's significantly better than the 31.9ºC warming I saw on our baseline test of the laptop alone.

Despite being frostier than a penguin whose name you just blanked on, the Liangstar’s fans are pretty quiet. Ten minutes into the test, I used a sound meter to measure noise – from a few inches away from the device and at my head height. At 59dB and 45dB respectively, the results weren’t really any worse than any of the best laptop cooling pads I’ve tested, and roughly equivalent to the noise the Acer Predator Helios 300 made on its own.

When it comes to design, the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad is well put together, in that sharp, angular style common to a lot of gaming gear. Using it felt ergonomically comfortable; I was able to tilt it to the right angle for my wrists, while the flip-up rests didn’t get in the way of using the trackpad or keyboard. Meanwhile, the monochrome lighting is a little more subtle than the RGB type common to many cooling pads – whether this is a positive or negative likely depends on your chromatic predilections, but I feel it’s nice enough here. I’m less keen on the tribal back tattoo at the bottom of the Liangstar, but maybe I’m just not the target audience.

With its powerful performance, you’d be forgiven for expecting this laptop cooling pad to be pricey. But it’s actually competitively priced in most markets: the blue-lit version I tested retails for just $19.99 / £20.99, although Australian readers will have to pay AU$66.91. In the US, you can also get red, white or multi-color lit versions for $22.49, $19.99 or $22.99 respectively. All told, this is a decent saving compared to the $29.99 / £29.77 / AU$49.77 TopMate C12 Laptop Cooling Pad or $26.99 / £21.99 Tecknet N5 Laptop Cooling Pad – despite the fact the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad offers superior cooling. So all told, if you care most about getting the best cooling for your cash, the Liangstar should be your go-to.

(Image credit: Future) Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad review: price & availability

• Released December 16, 2019
• Current price of $19.99 / £28.99 / AU$66.91

First launched on December 16, 2019, the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad is currently available for $19.99 / £20.99 / AU$66.91 from Amazon, with the US price being the lowest we’ve ever seen it. There may be some fluctuations here, though: the MSRP in the UK is listed as £28.99, yet prices have dropped as low as £14.44, so it’s worth keeping an eye on our price trackers, as you may be able to pick up even more of a bargain.

However, even at Amazon’s current prices, it undercuts most other products we’ve tested. The only exception is if you’re based in Australia – over there, the TopMate C12 Laptop Cooling Pad comes in cheaper at AU$49.77, but in tests I found its cooling less impressive than the Liangstar, meaning you may well find the extra AU$17.14 is a price worth paying.

(Image credit: Future) Should I buy the TopMate C12 Laptop Cooling Pad? Buy it if…

You want the best cooling
Thus far, the Liangstar delivers the best cooling performance I’ve seen from a laptop cooling pad at the affordable end of the market, keeping our testing laptop at a pretty balmy 37.5ºC during its intensive stress test.

You want an absolute bargain price
Even compared to other affordable laptop cooling pads, the Liangstar is surprisingly cheap. It’s priced much cheaper in the US and UK than many other cooling pads, despite the fact it offers superior cooling.

Don’t buy it if…

You want specific styling
The Liangstar is neither fish nor fowl in terms of design. Without conspicuous RGB lighting, it may not have enough of a gamer vibe for the esports crowd, but its hard angles and tribal logo might be a bit much for creatives.

You’re buying from Australia
OK, this is less of a "don’t buy" than it is a "think before you buy". The Liangstar has a bit of a markup in Australia, even more than we’d expect from the exchange rate and extra shipping. So it's worth considering if it’s as much as a bargain in your market.

(Image credit: Future) Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad review: also consider

TopMate C12 Laptop Cooling Pad
The TopMate C12 Laptop Cooling Pad can’t quite rival the Liangstar for cooling – its temperature rise was 22.8ºC versus the Liangstar’s 15.3ºC – but it does almost make up for it when it comes to cool points. Its customizable RGB lighting guarantees to give your gaming setup that extra pop, offering 10 different settings for its rainbow-hued LED trim. Read our full TopMate C12 Laptop Cooling Pad review.

How I tested the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad

• Tested it over multiple days
• Ran a stress test and measured temperature difference with a thermal camera
• Recorded the volume of fan noise 10 minutes into test with a sound level meter

To test the Liangstar Laptop Cooling Pad, I carried out all of the standard benchmarks we run on laptop cooling pads. Firstly, I measured our Razer Predator Helios 300 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 testing laptop’s hottest point to set a baseline, then ran a 3DMark Stress Test for 15 minutes with the cooling pad set to its maximum setting and then remeasured the temperature.

In addition, I checked how much noise the device kicks out with a sound level meter. Once the test had been running for ten minutes, I recorded the sound levels from three inches away and from head height to get a sense of the immediate and subjective noise levels generated by the cooling pad and the laptop combined. I then contrasted this against the noise generated by the laptop’s fans alone.

As well as this quantitative data, I made sure I got plenty of experience using the cooling pad so I could assess its ergonomics and how well it functions in practice. Here I benefited from the many years I’ve spent testing gadgets as well as the 30 years I’ve spent using gaming setups.

• First reviewed: March 2025
• Read more about how we test

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Nvidia has unveiled a dozen new GPUs at its GTC 2025 event, the company's biggest launch in two years.

Based on the Blackwell architecture, the newcomers use the RTX Pro moniker to differentiate themselves from the previous generations (Ada Lovelace, Ampere, and Turing) and, from their consumer breathens.

The flagship models are three RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPU variants with 96GB ECC GDDR7 memory and up to 4000 AI TOPS performance - twice the amount of memory in its former performance champion, the RTX 6000 and a staggering 4x the RTX 5090, the best GPU on the consumer market has to offer.

Nvidia GPU launches

Alongside the standard Workstation Edition, Nvidia also introduced the Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition and the Server Edition.

The latter is the successor to the L40 Data Center GPU series, bringing some much-needed consistency to the GPU nomenclature.

As for the Max-Q Workstation Edition, it remains a bit of a mystery. Nvidia launched Max-Q technology back in 2017 and this is usually associated with laptop GPUs trying to achieve maximum efficiency.

However, workstation PCs rarely aim for optimal energy consumption except perhaps in power-constrained environments like small form factor mini PCs.

Three other professional desktop GPUs were also introduced: the Pro 5000, Pro 4500 and Pro 4000, which will be available starting May 2025.

Given past product launch cycles, I expect more models focusing on the entry-level and mainstream parts of the market, to be launched by the end of 2025.

Six new laptop GPUs were also launched, all of them carrying the RTX Pro naming convention and, confusingly enough, some having the same name as their desktop counterparts.

The RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell is the new laptop flagship GPU with 24GB ECC GDDR7 memory; other models include the 4000, 3000, 2000, 1000, and 500 series and should directly replace their respective “Ada Generation” part.

All these parts will be available from OEM partners in mobile workstations starting in June 2025.

We’ll strive to update this article when further details of the cards (including pricing) are published.

Nvidia’s GTC Keynote also saw the formal launch of DGX Spark, formerly known as Project Digits, the DGX station and Blackwell Ultra (or GB300), Nvidia’s most powerful GPU ever.

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A surprising announcement at Nvidia GTC 2025 was the launch of the DGX station, a powerful supercomputer-class workstation PC that looks a lot like a traditional tower computer but with an Arm-based CPU inside.

This is not the first workstation Nvidia launched; it famously partnered with AMD to launch the precursor to the 2025 DGX Station called the DGX Station A100.

That one didn't have a Nvidia Arm CPU and needed separate PCIe AI accelerators (A100); the 2025 iteration doesn't. It also carried a price of more than $100,000 at launch.

Nvidia DGX Station

Nvidia confirmed that Asus, Boxx, Dell, HP, Lambda and Supermicro will sell their own versions of the DGX Station: the big name missing out is Lenovo.

The GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip that powers it delivers up to “20 PFlops of AI performance” which is likely to be measured using FP4 with sparsity.

That would also infer that it is half the performance of GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, so something’s not clear here and I wonder whether there’s more than one version of the GB300.

Nvidia hasn’t said how many or what type of (Arm) CPU cores the GB300 uses; ditto for the GPU subsystem.

Its predecessor, GH200, had 72 Arm Neoverse 2 CPU cores clocked at 3.1GHz, up to 144GB HBMe memory and 480GB LPDDR5x memory.

What we do know is that it has 784GB of unified system memory, which one can assume means HBM (288GB HBM3e) plus what Nvidia calls Fast Memory (496GB LPDDR5x most probably).

The original DGX Station (Image credit: Nvidia) Fastest NIC in a computer

Nvidia also disclosed the DGX Station will use its proprietary ConnectX-8 SuperNIC, a network technology that can deliver up to a staggering data center-class 800Gb/s connectivity.

A close-up of the opened chassis shows the workstation has three forward-facing 120mm fans, a motherboard with three PCIe slots, an Nvidia-branded soldered chip (perhaps the SuperNic), and two large uncovered dies.

One of which is the Grace GPU and the other with eight distinct tiles, the Blackwell GPU.

No details about expansion or storage capabilities, the PSU capacity, the cooling solution used or the price have been revealed.

Additionally, we do not know whether you will be able to plug in accelerator cards like the H200 NVL (or a theoretical B300 NVL) to significantly improve the performance of the DGX Station.

The DGX station is expected to compete with the likes of the Camino Grando, an EPYC-powered tower workstation that packs two AMD CPUs and up to eight GPUs.

We’ll strive to update this article when further details of this workstation PC (including pricing and availability) are published.

Nvidia’s GTC Keynote also saw the formal launch of DGX Spark, formerly known as Project Digits, 12 new professional GPUs and Blackwell Ultra (or GB300), Nvidia’s most powerful GPU ever.

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We're at that stage in the month where we're having to prepare ourselves for the next wave of movies that Hulu will be removing from its catalog.

But it looks like April is shaping up to be frightfully different compared to Hulu's previous lists. It's almost impossible to say but, I think this is the shortest 'leaving' list I've ever seen – and that's across all the best streaming services, not just Hulu.

A mere nine titles are getting the chop from Hulu this month, including seven movies and two documentaries, so it's a pleasure for me to say that Hulu's best movies and best TV shows have gained an extra life with their time on the platform. Have I heard of any of them? Never in my life – that's when you know you're not missing out on much.

But what's more exciting are the brand new movies and shows that are being added to Hulu in April – indeed, we're most excited for the arrival of the sixth and final season of The Handmaid's Tale, even if we must say our final goodbyes.

Everything leaving Hulu in April 2025

Leaving on April 6

Agnes (movie)

Leaving on April 13

She Will (movie)

Leaving on April 16

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (documentary)

Leaving on April 20

Totally Under Control (documentary)

Leaving on April 24

The Good Neighbor (movie)

Leaving on April 27

Resurrection (movie)

Leaving on April 30

After Everything (movie)
Code Name Banshee (movie)
Stars Fell Again (movie)

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Apple Nike Sport Band review

The Apple Nike Sport Band is a workout-ready wrist strap that’s built for the sporty type. At $49 / £49, this is by no means one of the cheaper Apple Watch bands available, but it does, admittedly, have a premium feel to it that takes your workout monitoring to the next level.

Specifically, this band is constructed of the sweat and waterproof material, fluoroelastomer. Apple says that each strap has at least 30% recycled fluoroelastomer and that the flakes littered across the strap are made from a minimum of 66% fluoroelastomer – pretty neat. Interestingly, these flakes are scattered in a randomized manner, ensuring that each Nike Sport Band is unique.

More generally, this is a very nice looking band. I tested the Midnight Sky variant, where the flakes created a starry sky impression against the gray-black strap. Other than Midnight Sky, you can choose from: Blue Flame (blue and orange); Cargo Khaki (green and blue); Desert Stone (a sandy color with orange and blue details); Magic Ember (pink); Pure Platinum (white with mulit-colored splodges); and Volt Splash (green). I was a big fan of the many color options available – whether you want a more muted, professional looking option like Midnight Sky or an in-your-face vibrant band like Magic Ember, there’s a style for anyone – something we always look for on our hunt for the best Apple Watch bands.

That’s not the only variability to mention, though, because there are also a number of size options. This strap is compatible with three different case sizes: 40, 42 and 46mm. You can also get it in either small-to-medium (140-190mm) or medium-to-large (160-210mm). I used the former and found it very easy to get a comfortable fit – just poke the aluminum pin through one of the many holes in the strap and you’re good to go.

Even when keeping this strap on for entire days at a time, I never felt any irritation or annoyance. The high density of holes means there’s plenty of room for your wrist to breathe and the material is inherently resistant against water and sweat, making this strap ideal for workouts, for instance. I went on a run and many a walk and never realized any strain or damage, so you can rest assured that there’s plenty of quality here.

And quality is exactly what you’d expect for an Apple Watch band of this price. At $49 / £49 this thing isn’t cheap. There are some third-party alternatives – like the CeMiKa Silicone Sport Straps or Yoohoo Adjustable Metal Strap – that can be yours for less than $15 / £15. But really, I think you’ll feel the difference. The quality of material, excellent color design and more premium look of the Nike Sport Band makes it a superior companion for your Apple Watch – especially if you’re someone that loves to get active.

(Image credit: Future) Apple Nike Sport Band review: Price & specs

(Image credit: Future) Should I buy the Apple Nike Sport Band? Buy it if…

You’re the active type
If you’re someone that likes to stay in shape – whether that’s running, lifting weights, swimming (maybe all of the above?) – this is the ideal watch strap for you. It’s made from a water-resistant material and has holes to let your wrists breathe – it doesn’t get much better than that.

You want an easy-to-fasten strap
Something I love about the Apple Nike Sport Band is how easy it is to fasten to your wrist. Just poke the aluminum pin through one of the strap’s holes and it will lock into place. No more messing around with an awkward buckle.

Don't buy it if…

You’re on a tight budget
The only real issue I can take with this strap is its price. I don’t think it’s crazy expensive given the quality on offer, but it’s certainly not cheap. If you’re looking for a massively budget-friendly strap, this one is to be avoided, unless you find it at a significantly discounted price.

You want an ultra premium option
If you’re on the other end of the spectrum and want a top-tier premium watch strap, this might not be flashy enough for you. There are high-calibre metallic options like the Milanese Loop, for instance, but that will set you back almost $100 / £100.

Apple Nike Sport Band review: Also consider

Apple Braided Solo Loop
We’ve been hands on with the Apple Braided Solo Loop and found it to be comfortable, easy to fit and conveniently waterproof. It is certainly quite pricey though, coming in at $99 / £99 – ouch. The stretchy band is ultra-easy to slip on, but it may cause some overhang – so maybe stick with this Nike strap if you want a more practical, fitness-oriented option. Read our full Apple Braided Solo Loop review.

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(Image credit: Valerie Plesch)

• Nvidia unveils Blackwell Ultra at GTC 2025
• New flagship GPU offers more power and efficiency than previous generations
• There's also a new Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition designed for enterprise workloads

Nvidia has taken the wraps off its latest Blackwell Ultra flagship GPU hardware as it looks to assert its place as the global leader in AI computing.

Revealed at its Nvidia GTC event in San Jose, the new Blackwell Ultra hardware offers more power and efficiency in the data center than previous generations as the company looks to establish itself as the backbone of future AI development and deployment.

Declaring it to be "built for the age of AI reasoning", Nvidia says Blackwell Ultra can help democratize AI adoption across the world, making it possible for more organizations to enjoy the benefits such compute can bring.

Nvidia Blackwell Ultra

Nvidia noted that the rapid growth of AI use cases around the world in the past few years has led for a huge demand for compute, as businesses and consumers alike clamour for more.

“AI has made a giant leap — reasoning and agentic AI demand orders of magnitude more computing performance,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

“We designed Blackwell Ultra for this moment — it’s a single versatile platform that can easily and efficiently do pretraining, post-training and reasoning AI inference.”

The increase in reasoning models in particular has led for a boom in requirements for a full-stack offering that is cost-effective but also gets the job done.

Built on the initial Blackwell architecture unveiled at GTC 2024, Blackwell Ultra will offer 1.5x more FP4 inference, and are set to be available ind evices built by Nvidia partners in the second half of 2025.

It will be present in a host of new offerings from Nvidia, including the upgraded GB300 NVL72 rack, which it says offers improved energy efficiency and serviceability, with bandwidth speeds of up to 130Tb/s.

Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition

However that wasn't all when it comes to new Blackwell hardware, as the company also revealed the Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition, designed for enterprise workloads such as multimodal AI inference, immersive content creation and scientific computing.

Nvidia says the new release offers huge advances on the previous-generation Ada Lovelace architecture L40S GPU, providing up to 5x higher LLM inference throughput for agentic AI applications, nearly 7x faster genomics sequencing, 3.3x speedups for text-to-video generation, nearly 2x faster inference for recommender systems and over 2x speedups for rendering.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

Each RTX PRO 6000 can also be partitioned into as many as four fully isolated instances with 24GB each to run simultaneous AI and graphics workloads, with 96GB of ultrafast GDDR7 memory and support for multi-instance GPU.

They can also be configured in high-density accelerated computing platforms for distributed inference workloads — or used to deliver virtual workstations using Nvidia vGPU software, for graphics-intensive applications or to power AI development.

"With the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition, enterprises across various sectors —including architecture, automotive, cloud services, financial services, game development, healthcare, manufacturing, media and entertainment and retail — can enable breakthrough performance for workloads such as multimodal generative AI, data analytics, engineering simulation, and visual computing," noted Nvidia's Sandeep Gupte.

Nvidia has taken the world a step closer to smart, humanoid robots with the launch of its latest advanced AI model.

At its Nvidia GTC 2025 event, the company revealed Isaac GROOT N1, which it says is, "the world’s first open Humanoid Robot foundation model", alongside several other important development tools.

Nvidia says its tools, which are available now, will make developing smarter and more functional robots easier than ever, along with allowing them to have more humanoid reasoning and skills - which doesn't sound terrifying at all.

Isaac GROOT N1

“The age of generalist robotics is here,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI.”

The company says its robotics work can help fill a shortfall of more than 50 million caused by a global labor shortage.

Nvidia says Isaac GROOT N1, which can be trained on real or synthetic data, can "easily" master tasks such as grasping, moving objects with either a single or multiple arms, and moving items from one arm to the other - but can also carry out multi-step tasks which combine a number of general skills.

The model is built across a dual-system architecture inspired by the principles of human cognition, with “System 1” is a fast-thinking action model, mirroring human reflexes or intuition, whereas “System 2” is a slow-thinking model for "deliberate, methodical decision-making."

Powered by a vision language model, System 2 is able to consider and analyze its environment, and the instructions it was given, to plan actions - which are then translated by System 1 into precise, continuous robot movements.

Among the other tools being released are a range of simulation frameworks and blueprints such as the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for generating synthetic data, which help generate large, detailed synthetic data sets needed for robot development which would be prohibitively expensive to gather in real life.

There is also Newton, an open source physics engine, created alongside Google DeepMind and Disney Research, which Nvidia says is purpose-built for developing robots.

Huang was joined on stage by Star Wars-inspired BDX droids during his GTC keynote, showing the possibilities of the technology in theme parks or other entertainment locations.

Nvidia first launched Project GROOT ("Generalist Robot 00 Technology") at GTC 2024, primarily focusing on industrial use cases, which could learn and become smarter by watching human behaviour, understanding natural language and emulating movements, allowing them to quickly learn coordination, dexterity and other skills in order to navigate, adapt and interact with the real world.

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Amazon is turning off the ability to process voice requests locally. It's a seemingly major privacy pivot and one that some Alexa users might not appreciate. However, this change affects exactly three Echo devices and only if you actively enabled Do Not Send Voice Recordings in the Alexa app settings.

Right. It's potentially not that big of a deal and, to be fair, the level of artificial intelligence Alexa+ is promising, let alone the models it'll be using, all but precludes local processing. It's pretty much what Daniel Rausch, Amazon's VP of Alexa and Echo, told us when he explained that these queries would be encrypted, sent to the cloud, and then processed by Amazon's and partner Antrhopic's AI models at servers far, far away.

That's what's happening, but let's unpack the general freakout.

After Amazon sent an email to customers, actually only those it seems who own an Echo Dot 4, Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen), and Echo Show 15, that the option to have Alexa voice queries processed on device would end on March 28, some in the media cried foul.

They had a point: Amazon didn't have the best track record when it comes to protecting your privacy. In 2019, there were reports of Amazon employees listening to customer recordings. Later, there were concerns that Amazon might hold onto recordings of, say, you yelling at Alexa because it didn't play the right song.

Amazon has since cleaned up its data act with encryption and, with this latest update, promises to delete your recordings from its servers.

A change for the few

(Image credit: Future)

This latest change, though, sounded like a step back because it takes away a consumer control, one that some might've been using to keep their voice data off Amazon's servers.

However, the vast majority of Echo devices out there aren't even capable of on-device voice processing, which is why most of them didn't even have this control.

A few years ago, Amazon published a technical paper on its efforts to bring "On-device speech processing" to Echo devices. They were doing so to put "processing on the edge," and reduce latency and bandwidth consumption.

Turns out it wasn't easy – Amazon described it as a massive undertaking. The goal was to put automatic speech recognition, whisper detection, and speech identification locally on a tiny, relatively low-powered smart speaker system. Quite a trick, considering that in the cloud, each process ran "on separate server nodes with their own powerful processors."

The paper goes into significant detail, but suffice it to say that Amazon developers used a lot of compression to get Alexa's relatively small AI models to work on local hardware.

It was always the cloud

In the end, the on-device audio processing was only available on those three Echo models, but there is a wrinkle here.

The specific feature Amazon is disabling, "Do Not Send Voice Recordings," never precluded your prompts from being handled in the Amazon cloud.

The processing power that these few Echos had was not to handle the full Alexa query locally. Instead, the silicon was used to recognize the wake word ("Alexa"), record the voice prompt, use voice recognition to make a text transcription of the prompt, and send that text to Amazon's cloud, where the AI acts on it and sends a response.

The local audio is then deleted.

Big models need cloud-based power

(Image credit: Amazon)

Granted, this is likely how everyone would want their Echo and Alexa experience to work. Amazon gets the text it needs but not the audio.

But that's not how the Alexa experience works for most Echo owners. I don't know how many people own those particular Echo models, but there are almost two dozen different Echo devices, and this affects just three of them.

Even if those are the most popular Echos, the change only affects people who dug into Alexa settings to enable "Do Not Send Voice Recordings." Most consumers are not making those kinds of adjustments.

This brings us back to why Amazon is doing this. Alexa+ is a far smarter and more powerful AI with generative, conversational capabilities. Its ability to understand your intentions may hinge not only on what you say, but your tone of voice.

It's true that even though your voice data will be encrypted in transit, it surely has to be decrypted in the cloud for Alexa's various models to interpret and act on it. Amazon is promising safety and security, and to be fair, when you talk to ChatGPT Voice and Gemini Live, their cloud systems are listening to your voice, too.

When we asked Amazon about the change, here's what they told us:

“The Alexa experience is designed to protect our customers’ privacy and keep their data secure, and that’s not changing. We’re focusing on the privacy tools and controls that our customers use most and work well with generative AI experiences that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of tools and controls, including the option to not save their voice recordings at all. We’ll continue learning from customer feedback, and building privacy features on their behalf.”

For as long as the most impactful models remain too big for local hardware, this will be the reality of our Generative AI experience. Amazon is simply falling into line in preparation for Alexa+.

It's not great news, but also not the disaster and privacy and data safety nightmare it's made out to be.

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