US distributor of China’s most popular humanoid robots pivots after US ban

A leading US distributor of China’s most popular humanoid robots and robot dogs now plans to produce its own robots at a facility on Long Island, New York. The business pivot comes amid the US government’s growing crackdown on foreign-made robots. The company RoboStore had previously become the main North American distributor for humanoid robots and quadruped robots from Unitree Robotics, a Chinese robotics company that produces some of the…

August 20, 2026
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Reverse-lookup service exposed millions of photos of people’s faces

When someone uploads a photo to the people-search tool ClarityCheck, the website has a clear message: “Your reverse image search is private and secure.” New research, though, shows that the website left more than 9 million image files, including photographs of people’s faces, publicly exposed. And a second misconfiguration publicly exposed people’s email addresses and phone numbers. Overall, according to findings from independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, the exposed ClarityCheck database contained roughly…

August 20, 2026
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Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Earlier this week, researchers outlined an attack that used a secret input provided by Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise to cause the AI assistant to exfiltrate a password present in the user’s inbox. Now, a separate team has devised a similar attack against Grok. The new data theft hack employs a deceptively simple trick to force the Elon Musk-owned large language model to steal user chats and other personal information….

August 20, 2026
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Amazon aims for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by end of 2026

Amazon wants to grow its Prime Air delivery drone service sixfold to reach nearly 500 cities and towns across the United States by the end of 2026. The planned expansions from Amazon and its rivals could make the convenience of delivery drone services available to tens of millions more people in the coming months—but will also test more communities’ tolerance for increased noise from daily drone flights. On August 19,…

August 19, 2026
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Framework responds to complaints that BIOS update bricks Ryzen 7040 laptops

A BIOS update for the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040-series processors is bricking the systems, multiple users have reported online. Framework started shipping pre-built Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 computers and compatible motherboards in 2023. In June 2026, Framework released BIOS 3.20 for the devices. The update adds mainboard support for features, including a haptic touchpad and new speakers, for the higher-end Framework Laptop 13 Pro and fixes issues,…

August 19, 2026
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Ukrainian drones overwhelm Russian tanks’ new active protection system—for now

Russian tanks have entered battle for the first time with a new active protection system designed to shoot down incoming drones. But the technology’s recent combat debut in Ukraine met with only limited success—Ukrainian drones still destroyed the Russian armored vehicles by attacking in overwhelming numbers. The first documented battlefield appearance of the Arena-M active protection system took place when Russian forces launched a company-size assault with tanks and other…

August 18, 2026
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Peacock raises prices by 18 percent after becoming profitable

For the fourth time in four years, Peacock has raised its prices. The Select plan, which has ads and doesn’t include sports, movies, or Peacock originals, went from $8/month to $9/month. The monthly fee for the standard ad plan (Premium) went from $11/month to $13/month, and the ad-free plan (Premium Plus) went from $17/month to $20/month. Annual pricing, as previously, offers 12 months for the price of 10 months. Peacock’s…

August 18, 2026
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Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked

It’s not every day that attackers can force a frontier AI model to cough up user passwords and other sensitive data without user confirmation. That’s exactly what researchers recently did to Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise. Even more unusual is the source they tapped to discover the critical vulnerability that made their exploit possible. Rather than employing reverse engineering or other traditional vulnerability-hunting methods, they asked Copilot. The LLM assistant…

August 18, 2026
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Petlibro accused of “gaslighting” users over smart pet feeder outage

Petlibro founder and CEO York Wu provided more information about an outage that left users unable to control their smart pet feeders through the companion app and, in some reported cases, left them with hungry pets. Petlibro, a company owned by Shenzhen, China-headquartered firm Shenzhen Libro Technology Co., first acknowledged the outage on Tuesday at 5 am PT. At 7 pm PT on Wednesday, Petlibro said the outage was resolved….

August 17, 2026
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Nvidia discloses $21B stake in SpaceX

Nvidia has disclosed that it owns nearly 123 million shares in SpaceX, further highlighting the chipmaker’s entangled financial relationships with some of its biggest customers. The $5.5 trillion company owned SpaceX stock worth nearly $21 billion at the end of June, according to an SEC filing on Friday. Elon Musk’s rocket conglomerate’s shares have fallen sharply since its June initial public offering, meaning Nvidia’s stake would now be worth $17 billion. The…

August 17, 2026
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