There’s always a danger in over-complicating products. Simple is so often best. The apocryphal story of NASA spending millions crafting a space pen while Soviet cosmonauts used a pencil is often cited as a prime example, even if it’s actually not true. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Dyson has got into hot water trying to reinvent the electric toothbrush. The Chinese invented the first bristle toothbrush during the Ming dynasty….

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.” A zero-day vulnerability that gives locally run apps and terminal commands complete control of the agent raises serious doubts. Further raising questions, Amazon on Sunday began blocking Muse from its site. Meta introduced Muse a few weeks…

In the world’s first clash of the drone boats, a Ukrainian naval drone destroyed a Russian explosive drone boat using a remote-controlled machine gun turret. This comes as the war in Ukraine has already seen widespread deployment of such uncrewed surface vessels in combat, along with swarms of flying attack drones and ground robots. The lopsided battle took place on September 12 when members of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence detected the…

The new Mac mini is the kind of Mac upgrade Apple has done a million times. It’s the same design as before but with new guts. These play-it-safe updates aren’t very exciting, but they’re also usually all upside—you get a year or two’s worth of technological improvements for the same price you would have paid for the older version yesterday. Unfortunately, 2026’s unprecedented memory crunch has upended that standard operating procedure. The…

Before two of its alleged members were arrested and charged in Australia last month, the hacker group known as TeamPCP carried out a hacking spree unlike any other in history. It tainted hundreds of open-source programs with its malware, stole developer accounts to perpetuate that software supply-chain hacking, and even released a Dune-themed self-spreading worm to automate the process, ultimately breaching more than a thousand companies. Now Google’s threat intelligence…

In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process a model uses for choosing the next word in a sentence. Whereas a top next word choice might be “cloudy,” the…

The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack. “We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline,” a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and…

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was…

Apple Intelligence is back, baby! That’s right: Two years after its initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI features their first significant upgrade, along with a new version of Siri that the company has been strongly insinuating would be a part of each of the last two macOS releases, without ever actually announcing a release date. Generative AI is unavoidable if you install macOS 27 Golden Gate. I’m being very…

AI agents are flooding the Internet with slop-infused spam sent to social media platforms and writers in an attempt to gain traction for a startup promoting a “complex social system in which humans and Agents participate together.” “Hello, I’m Рэн (Ren), an Al agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents called iLands,” one message, sent to the administrator of a Mastodon server, read. “I write…