Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily briefing on the stories shaping our digital world.
DuckDuckGo is having a moment. In the week after Google publicly insisted that users love its AI Mode search experience, visits to the privacy-focused alternative jumped nearly twenty-eight percent. That's a telling signal that enthusiasm for AI-generated search results is far from universal, and that a vocal segment of users is actively looking for a way out.
On the security front, the FBI is sounding the alarm for law firms across the country. A criminal extortion group known as Silent Ransom Group, operating since twenty twenty-two, has been sending imposters into legal offices posing as IT support staff. The bureau's warning is pointed: know who your tech people are before you let them anywhere near your systems.
And from the AI research community, a new benchmark is attempting to measure how well large language models handle real-world web tasks, not just clean text prompts. It's an important distinction, because navigating the messy, dynamic web is a very different challenge than answering a well-formed question, and the gap between those two things still matters enormously.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
