Bitdefender on Tuesday announced the second-generation Box, a revamped security system for your home network and smart home devices. Promising to provide unparalleled protection from fraud, phishing, and network attacks, the Box 2 could be the security solution for your superconnected smart home.
Smart devices are great, but they don’t usually have very good security. According to Gartner and Business Insider, there will be around 2.5 billion connected home devices in 2019, and most of them probably won’t include built-in or robust security options.
Most of the time, these devices are designed for ease of use over security, and while that can be dangerous, there is something you can do about it. In 2015, we saw the release of Bitdefender’s Box, a hardware solution for your home network and smart home devices — like a hardware firewall for your home.
It provided a decent level of security for the average user, but it was plagued by a tricky setup, and didn’t quite live up to expectations — it wasn’t even able to fend off the malware we used to test it. The Box 2, however, will reportedly sport a vastly improved array of features.
According to Bitdefender, the next generation of its hardware security solution can not only secure your smart home devices, but also your home network. By using machine learning to figure out your average internet traffic habits, the Box 2 will reportedly be able to spot any malicious traffic and put a stop to it before your network is compromised.
The Box 2 improves on the previous generation by beefing up its hardware and expanding its malware protection capabilities to include advanced threat detection and dynamic vulnerability assessment.
Bitdefender claims the Box 2 will keep an eye on your home network and smart home devices by periodically scanning for vulnerabilities.
This combination of passive and active threat detection could make for a powerful security device. The Bitdefender Box 2 will also ship with a subscription to Bitdefender Total Security for an unlimited number of Windows, MacOS, and Android devices.
Pre-orders for the Box 2 will open up this summer, and shipments are expected to start by the end of 2017 in the U.S., followed by Europe and Japan.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?