Development

UNESCO and SAP selected the AI system EDiSON for the Solomon Islands

SAP and UNESCO have agreed to deploy the AI-supported disaster management system EDiSON in the Solomon Islands.

The platform, created by SAP Japan and the start-up INSPIRATION PLUS, utilises the SAP Business Technology Platform with machine learning to merge real-time meteorological information with historical records, rather than relying on isolated datasets.

A system that delivers predictive insights that help authorities act before severe weather strikes. It anticipates terrain damage, guides emergency services towards threatened areas and supports decisions on evacuation orders.

The initiative aims to serve as a model for other small island states facing similar climate-related pressures.

UNESCO officials say the project strengthens early warning capacity and encourages long-term resilience. EDiSON will become operational in 2026 and aims to offer a scalable approach for nations with limited technical resources.

Its performance in Japan has already demonstrated how integrated data management can overcome fragmented information flows and restricted analytical tools.

The design of EDiSON enables governments to adopt advanced disaster preparedness systems instead of relying on costly, bespoke infrastructure. A partnership that seeks to improve national readiness in the Solomon Islands, where earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones and floods regularly threaten communities.

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Chrome receives emergency update to fix high-severity zero-day flaw

Google has issued an emergency update to fix the seventh Chrome zero-day exploited in attacks this year. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-13223, is caused by a type confusion bug in the browser’s V8 JavaScript engine and was used in the wild before the patch was released.

The company says updates will roll out across the Stable Desktop channel in the coming weeks, though users can install the fix immediately by checking for updates in Chrome’s settings. Google is withholding technical details until most users have upgraded to avoid encouraging further exploitation.

The vulnerability was reported by a member of Google’s Threat Analysis Group and allowed attackers to trigger code execution or browser crashes through malicious HTML pages. It continues a pattern of high-severity zero-days discovered and patched throughout 2025.

Google stresses that prompt updates remain essential, as attackers often target unpatched systems. Automatic updates can help ensure that newly released fixes reach users quickly and reduce exposure to emerging threats.

Security experts also recommend enabling scheduled antivirus scans and using protective features, such as hardened browsers or VPNs. With multiple zero-days already patched this year, analysts say more are likely, and users should keep Chrome’s update settings enabled.

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AI helps to fight against antibiotic-resistant superbugs

UK scientists are launching a three-year initiative to use AI in the fight against drug-resistant infections, a growing threat to public health.

The project, backed by £45 million from GSK and coordinated with the Fleming Initiative, aims to develop new tools against pathogens that currently evade treatment.

Researchers will focus on priority bacteria and fungi identified by the World Health Organisation, including E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, MRSA and Aspergillus.

These AI models will be utilised to design antibiotics and enhance the understanding of immune responses, with data shared globally to expedite drug development.

Experts warn that antimicrobial resistance could claim millions of lives by 2050 if new solutions are not found. The initiative reflects an urgent need to pool scientific expertise and technology to create next-generation treatments and vaccines for resistant infections.

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AI promises better communication tools for disabled users

Students with disabilities met technology executives at National Star College in Gloucestershire, UK to explain what they need from communication devices. Battery life emerged as the top priority, with users saying they need devices that last 24 hours without charging so they can communicate all day long.

One student who controls his device by moving his eyes said losing power during the day feels like having his voice ripped away from him. Another student with cerebral palsy wants her device to help her run a bath independently and eventually design fairground rides that disabled people can enjoy.

Technology companies responded by promising artificial intelligence improvements that will make the devices work much faster. The new AI features will help users type more quickly, correct mistakes automatically and even create personalised voices that sound like the actual person speaking.

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NVIDIA pushes forward with AI-ready data

Enterprises are facing growing pressure to prepare unstructured data for use in modern AI systems as organisations struggle to turn prototypes into production tools.

Around forty percent of AI projects advance beyond the pilot phase, largely due to limits in data quality and availability. Most organisational information now comes in unstructured form, ranging from emails to video files, which offers little coherence and places a heavy load on governance systems.

AI agents need secure, recent and reliable data instead of fragmented information scattered across multiple storage silos. Preparing such data demands extensive curation, metadata work, semantic chunking and the creation of vector embeddings.

Enterprises also struggle with the rising speed of data creation and the spread of duplicate copies, which increases both operational cost and security concerns.

An emerging approach by NVIDIA, known as the AI data platform, aims to address these challenges by embedding GPU acceleration directly into the data path. The platform prepares and indexes information in place, allowing enterprises to reduce data drift, strengthen governance and avoid unnecessary replication.

Any change to a source document is immediately reflected in the associated AI representations, improving accuracy and consistency for business applications.

NVIDIA is positioning its own AI Data Platform reference design as a next step for enterprise storage. The design combines RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, BlueField three DPUs and integrated AI processing pipelines.

Leading technology providers including Cisco, Dell Technologies, IBM, HPE, NetApp, Pure Storage and others have adopted the model as they prepare storage systems for broader use of generative AI in the enterprise sector.

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OpenAI and Intuit expand financial AI collaboration

Yesterday, OpenAI and Intuit announced a major strategic partnership aimed at reshaping how people manage their personal and business finances. The arrangement will allow Intuit apps to appear directly inside ChatGPT, enabling secure and personalised financial actions within a single environment.

An agreement that is worth more than one hundred million dollars and reinforces Intuit’s long-term push to strengthen its AI-driven expert platform.

Intuit will broaden its use of OpenAI’s most advanced models to support financial tasks across its products. Frontier models will help power AI agents that assist with tax preparation, cash flow forecasting, payroll management and wider financial planning.

Intuit will also continue using ChatGPT Enterprise internally so employees can work with greater speed and accuracy.

The partnership is expected to help consumers make more informed financial choices instead of relying on fragmented tools. Users will be able to explore suitable credit offers, receive clearer tax answers, estimate refunds and connect with tax specialists.

Businesses will gain tailored insights based on real time data that can improve cash flow, automate customer follow ups and support more effective outreach through email marketing.

Leaders from both companies argue that the collaboration will give people and firms a meaningful financial advantage. They say greater personalisation, deeper data analysis and more effortless decision making will support stronger household finances and more resilient small enterprises.

The deal expands the growing community of OpenAI enterprise customers and strengthens Intuit’s position in global financial technology.

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Web services recover after Cloudflare restores its network systems

Cloudflare has resolved a technical issue that briefly disrupted access to major platforms, including X, ChatGPT, and Letterboxd. Users had earlier reported internal server error messages linked to Cloudflare’s network, indicating that pages could not be displayed.

The disruption began around midday UK time, with some sites loading intermittently as the problem spread across the company’s infrastructure. Cloudflare confirmed it was investigating an incident affecting multiple customers and issued rolling updates as engineers worked to identify the fault.

Outage tracker Down Detector also experienced difficulties during the incident, later showing a sharp rise in reports once it came back online. The pattern pointed to a broad network-level failure rather than isolated platform issues.

Users saw repeated internal server error warnings asking them to try again, though services began recovering as Cloudflare isolated the cause. The company has not yet released full technical details, but said the fault has been fixed and that systems are stabilising.

Cloudflare provides routing, security, and reliability tools for a wide range of online services, making a single malfunction capable of cascading globally. The company said it would share further information on the incident and steps taken to prevent similar failures.

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Misconfigured database triggered global Cloudflare failure, CEO says

Cloudflare says its global outage on 18 November was caused by an internal configuration error, not a cyberattack. CEO Matthew Prince apologised to users after a permissions update to a ClickHouse cluster generated a malformed feature file that caused systems worldwide to crash.

The oversized file exceeded a hard limit in Cloudflare’s routing software, triggering failures across its global edge. Intermittent recoveries during the first hours of the incident led engineers to suspect a possible attack, as the network randomly stabilised when a non-faulty file propagated.

Confusion intensified when Cloudflare’s externally hosted status page briefly became inaccessible, raising fears of coordinated targeting. The root cause was later traced to metadata duplication from an unexpected database source, which doubled the number of machine-learning features in the file.

The outage affected Cloudflare’s CDN, security layers, and ancillary services, including Turnstile, Workers KV, and Access. Some legacy proxies kept limited traffic moving, but bot scores and authentication systems malfunctioned, causing elevated latencies and blocked requests.

Engineers halted the propagation of the faulty file by mid-afternoon and restored a clean version before restarting affected systems. Prince called it Cloudflare’s most serious failure since 2019 and said lessons learned will guide major improvements to the company’s infrastructure resilience.

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Growing internet connections mask deep inequalities, says ITU report

According to a recent International Telecommunication Union (ITU) report, the number of internet connections continues to grow, but important inequalities persist across quality, affordability and usage.

The ITU’s Facts and Figures 2025 report estimates that nearly 6 billion people (around three-quarters of the world’s population) are online in 2025, up from 5.8 billion in 2024. Despite the increase, 2.2 billion remain offline, the majority in low- and middle-income countries.

The divide is especially stark in quality of connection. While 5G now reaches 55 per cent of the global population, coverage is heavily skewed: just 4 per cent of people in low-income countries have 5G access, compared to 84 per cent in high-income economies.

Users in wealthier countries also generate much more data, a typical user in a high-income country now sends or receives nearly eight times more mobile data than someone in a low-income country.

Affordability remains a major hurdle: even with falling median prices for mobile broadband, access is still unaffordable for about 60 per cent of the population in many low- and middle-income countries. Meanwhile, digital skills, especially advanced skills like online safety, problem-solving and content-creation, lag behind basic usage, limiting how effectively people can benefit from connectivity.

ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin emphasised that achieving universal and meaningful connectivity isn’t just about getting people online, it also requires prioritising speed, reliability, cost and skills.

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Google enters a new frontier with Gemini 3

A new phase of its AI strategy has begun for Google with the release of Gemini 3, which arrives as the company’s most advanced model to date.

The new system prioritises deeper reasoning and more subtle multimodal understanding, enabling users to approach difficult ideas with greater clarity instead of relying on repetitive prompting. It marks a major step for Google’s long-term project to integrate stronger intelligence into products used by billions.

Gemini 3 Pro is already available in preview across the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, AI Studio, Vertex AI and Google’s new development platform known as Antigravity.

A model that performs at the top of major benchmarks in reasoning, mathematics, tool use and multimodal comprehension, offering substantial improvements compared with Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Deep Think mode extends the model’s capabilities even further, reaching new records on demanding academic and AGI-oriented tests, although Google is delaying wider release until additional safety checks conclude.

Users can rely on Gemini 3 to learn complex topics, analyse handwritten material, decode long academic texts or translate lengthy videos into interactive guides instead of navigating separate tools.

Developers benefit from richer interactive interfaces, more autonomous coding agents and the ability to plan tasks over longer horizons.

Google Antigravity enhances this shift by giving agents direct control of the development environment, allowing them to plan, write and validate code independently while remaining under human supervision.

Google emphasises that Gemini 3 is its most extensively evaluated model, supported by independent audits and strengthened protections against manipulation. The system forms the foundation for Google’s next era of agentic, personalised AI and will soon expand with additional models in the Gemini 3 series.

The company expects the new generation to reshape how people learn, build and organise daily tasks instead of depending on fragmented digital services.

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