Today Briefly

Today Briefly

Depending on your disposition, a minute in an ice bath can feel like agony or ecstasy. Perhaps you wince at the thought of stepping foot in an ice bath, or maybe you're an experienced cold plunger who can't get enough of the endorphin-releasing sensation. Either way, sitting in an ice bath isn't simply an endurance game. How long you cold plunge for matters.

Every new Google email account comes with 15GB of free storage -- a solid offer at no cost. However, that space can fill up fast, especially since it also covers files in Google Drive and Google Photos. If your inbox is cluttered with unread newsletters and sneaky spam, there's a way to clean house without losing important messages. With the right approach, you can preserve what matters while giving yourself a fresh start.

twitter/X is a cesspool of AI and political nonsense. Especially when they realized grok could do images and the immature abuse they can lay on that feature Threads is not only bad UI but is almost as big of a cesspool as X, just not QUITE as skeevy - at least there isn't a question on legality. There is just clickbait extraordinaire

I'm deeply skeptical of anyone who calls themselves an expert in the metaverse,

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Those words, from a Senior Director of Product Design, brought to mind an old Aesop fable. A father is trying to get his sons to stop arguing, so he hands them a bundle of sticks and asks them to break it. They try, but they can't. Then he unties the bundle and asks them to break each stick individually. They snap them in half, one by one. Moral of the story? Individually weak, together strong.

Wiz Security's research team identified that a subset of repositories configured regular expressions for AWS CodeBuild webhook filters intended to limit trusted actor IDs, but these filters were insufficient, allowing a predictably acquired actor ID to gain administrative permissions. The four affected repositories that put the AWS Console supply chain at risk were the AWS SDK for JavaScript v3, the general-purpose cryptographic library aws-lc, amazon-corretto-crypto-provider, and awslabs/open-data-registry, a repository of publicly available datasets accessible from AWS resources.

Australian-born Sue Fennessy has spent the last 30 years at the coal face of digital media. After creating the data aggregation tool Standard Media Index, she says she became increasingly frustrated by the lack of effectiveness of digital media platforms and the increasingly negative impact of social media on our day-to-day lives. Her next endeavor, the social media app WeAre8, was born after asking herself one question:

Conservative newspaper the Daily Mail enlisted a top creative agency to help position it as a 'powerful positive force'. Many titles are embracing marketing to sell subscriptions and alter perceptions, but the 124-year-old title's efforts inspired a bit more attention. The paper's detractors, to put it kindly, made sure I knew how difficult a brief the agency had. Expletives were shared. Some questioned why the newspaper was even 'platformed' by The Drum. It's a brand that stirs strong emotion...

My friend Megumi, a classical musician from Tokyo who really likes to eat, takes trips to Sapporo "just for the food". She is not alone: the route between Tokyo's Haneda and Sapporo's New Chitose airports is one of the busiest domestic flight paths in Japan. Before I visited Sapporo, I called her. "Make sure to bring two stomachs," she advised. The city is the capital of Hokkaido, the most northerly of Japan's main islands, which contains more than 20 per cent of the country's landmass, but only about four per cent of its population. The island's cold waters are home to some of the world's most prized sea urchins and crabs, as well as much of the fish used by top sushi chefs. Fed by mountain springs, its unspoilt valleys are home to remarkably flavourful produce. And with its swathes of grazing land, Hokkaido is also the country's leading producer of beef, lamb and dairy: the last two ingredients are rarely used elsewhere in Japan, something that accounts for the character of eating in Sapporo.

As explains, "if you are late for work, do some work from home, or do anything on Teams and Outlook from any network that is not your organization's, your employer would know about this. This obviously did not sit well with workers who either work in hybrid setups or do not appreciate this type of invasion of privacy."

Both YouTube's size and its ability to distract are a result of its most important feature - that it allows anyone to become a broadcaster. Because of this strategy, and the digital media revolution in general, there has been a shift in how we all consume media over the past few years. For example, with regards to broadcast media, CNN has 61,000 subscribers on YouTube, yet the otherwise unknown Young Turks news channel (the bombastic, longest standing all online American politics show),

In 2026 and beyond, threat actor use of AI is expected to transition decisively from the exception to the norm, noticeably transforming the cyber threat landscape, noted security leaders at Google's Mandiant and Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG). We anticipate that actors will fully leverage AI to enhance the speed, scope, and effectiveness of operations, building upon the robust evidence and novel use cases observed in 2025. This includes social engineering, information operations, and malware development.

K.J. Boone, the exec, is a bad man. In the 1970s he made a famous speech to a gathering of his fellow petroleum magnates that provided the blueprint for climate change denial, and he takes credit for the U.S.'s decision to abandon the Kyoto Protocol. This doesn't matter much to our narrator, Jill "Doll" Blaine, who has so far comforted 342 dying souls, each equally

With 12 years' heritage in AI as well as multiple patents granted and pending, LoopMe is at the forefront of applying AI to advertising. As the first to apply AI to brand advertising solutions, LoopMe has long been at the cutting edge of bringing the power of this technology to solve industry challenges. The AI Academy builds on LoopMe's commitment to making AI accessible to all through education and provides an opportunity to share its expertise with the wider industry.

The history of winemaking in Oregon dates back over 150 years, but it wasn't until the 1960s that things really started to take off. The state - particularly the Willamette Valley region - became known for producing pinot noir, and more vineyards were planted to expand the local wine industry. While California produces the lion's share of American wine, Oregon is still considered a leader in the domestic industry, ranking fourth nationally for wine production by volume.

The English language is a marvelous thing. In just the past few years, we've been treated to the invention of words or terms that have captured new technologies or given voice to how it feels to be alive in 2026: rage bait, rizz, slop, hard pants, nepo baby, brain rot. But occasionally, new phrases arise that describe something much older-perhaps even ancient-to which no one has given a name.

This week, Asus confirmed that it won't be making any more smartphones. The company will instead focus its energy on R&D on commercial PCs and physical AI (i.e., robotics and smart glasses). The company will continue to support existing smartphones, however. Per Ice Universe, Samsung will unveil the S26 series on February 25. Pre-orders will begin on February 26 and end on March 4. Then a pre-sale period from March 5 to March 10, and then general sales from March 11.

This week has seen another wave of appointments and departures at brands, media owners and agencies. The Drum has rounded up the key moves from the EMEA, APAC and North America regions below. This week includes moves from Smart Energy, The Open University, McDonald's Vice, and Walgreens. Smart Energy Gavin Sheppard, chief marketing officer at Smart Energy GB, the government-backed joint venture of the British Energy industry, is to step down at the end of this year.