In 2023, malware tracked as BlackLotus became the first publicly documented in-the-wild UEFI bootkit capable of bypassing Secure Boot on fully updated Windows 11 systems. With the industry-wide chain-of-trust mechanism subverted, the malware was able to run malicious code before Windows was fully loaded and many security defenses were operational. Microsoft had already patched the vulnerability that BlackLotus exploited in 2022. In 2023 and 2024, Microsoft issued additional updates. The…

One of the most useful gadgets in my kitchen is now a screen that never asks me for anything. I recently bought a $48 DIY display kit from Seeed Studio (yes, that’s three E’s), developed in collaboration with TRMNL, that lets me display whatever I want, using whichever software ecosystem I prefer. I previously built something similar by modding a Lenovo ThinkSmart View, which was selling for around $30 on…

Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl recently declared “it’s time for a renaissance in energy and in supersonic flight” as the supersonic airliner company unveiled a Colorado factory dedicated to making gas turbines for AI data centers. But Boom may be facing turbulence after early backers for both ventures have questioned the company’s delivery timeline or backed out entirely. One of the company’s first customers, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, has…

An official extension for Anthropic’s Claude model was backdoored and threatened as many as 5,000 developers’ machines, multiple sources reported Friday. Anthropic so far has yet to warn customers of the incident. The compromised package was a VS Code extension available in the marketplace of Cursor, a maker of AI-assisted developer tools, the company said Friday. The malicious version, 2.1.313, subsequently affected “at most 5,000 users,” presumably when they either…

In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape. Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing “exponential growth” in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year…

In the future, you won’t be able to use Reddit without logging in. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the impending change in a letter (PDF) to shareholders today about Q3 performance. He said that Reddit is shifting “to a logged-in-only experience,” adding: Moving to primarily logged-in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible, and can find the content and communities most relevant to them. It is better…

The European Union plans to create the first subsea Internet cable directly connecting Europe to Greenland. The Pan-Arctic Cable project could also extend to Canada and eventually link with Japan and South Korea, notably bypassing the United States. The Pan-Arctic Cable is described as a European Union flagship project in a European Commission joint communication published on October 20, 2026. The policy document describes a new European strategy for the…

Since debuting in 2019, Amazon’s Echo Studio targeted users who wanted superior audio quality from their Alexa-based smart speaker. The latest Echo Studio adds another less-expected differentiator: an integrated camera. The Echo Studio with Home Camera, released alongside a pile of other Alexa devices today, doesn’t have many audio upgrades over the standard Echo Studio. Each speaker has one 3.75-inch high-excursion woofer and three full-range drivers. They both support Dolby…

Defenders across the world face the burden of responding to yet another botched code-execution vulnerability, this time in boot-time firmware used by most of the world’s server vendors and data centers. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 9.5 out of 10, resides in the TianoCore EDK II, an open source codebase that hardware makers and cloud providers use to create the UEFI firmware that runs during the boot-up sequence….