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UK Biobank is under scrutiny tonight after hackers reportedly listed its data for sale through channels linked to China. The institution holds medical records on half a million people, though it insists no personally identifiable information was compromised. That distinction matters, but it will offer limited comfort to those whose health data sits in that database.
Shifting to the workplace, Microsoft is rolling out what it calls Agent Mode across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint this week. The company had previously branded this vision as vibe working, and it represents a meaningful step beyond the Copilot features businesses have been trialing. The idea is that the AI can now actually command these applications rather than simply assist within them, a subtle but significant difference.
And over at Sony, a robotics team is claiming a genuine breakthrough in machine dexterity after their system demonstrated the ability to beat human opponents at ping-pong. Chess and Go were already lost to the machines, and now a sport requiring real-time physical coordination has joined that list. The researchers say the implications extend well beyond the table, into any task demanding speed and precision.
That is your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
