More cities and towns deployed drones to spot illegal fireworks during the Fourth of July celebrations commemorating America’s 250th anniversary—leading to a $100,000 fine in one instance and coming as part of a broader national trend of first responders turning to drone surveillance. Police and fire departments have described using both increased drone surveillance and steep fines to deter people from shooting off illegal fireworks, with many departments publicizing their…

A firmware update is behind recent reports that some Hue Bridge Pro smart hubs are no longer working, Ars Technica has confirmed. In late June, there were reports of some Hue Bridge Pro devices not working properly after installing a firmware update. Philips released firmware version 2071353020 in early June, saying that it included “several small changes” to make Hue Bridge Pros work “better.” But some customers had a different…

A patch Microsoft released on Wednesday to fix a zero-day vulnerability in its Defender security engine may cause Windows machines to write files large enough to completely consume available disk space, the researcher who discovered the flaw said. RoguePlanet, tracked as CVE-2026-50656, came to public notice in June when NightmareEclipse, the pseudonymous name used by a researcher, disclosed it along with code for exploiting it. The vulnerability allows remote attackers…

Allstate Insurance Company has accused Broadcom of haphazardly issuing audits against it because the insurance firm decided not to renew its contracts with VMware and CA Technologies. The allegations were made in relation to a lawsuit that VMware filed against Allstate in December 2025, according to The Register. In the complaint, Broadcom alleges that Allstate failed to comply with license audits, which Broadcom claims its contract with Allstate requires. In…

A Linux vulnerability that allows untrusted virtual machines to gain root access to host machines is one of two high-severity flaws to surface this week in the open source operating system. The vulnerability resides in KVM, which is, in essence, a virtual machine app included in the kernel of many Linux distributions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-53359, allows guest virtual machines—such as those used in cloud platforms to isolate one…

Last week, thousands of SamKnows routers were bricked after a government program ran its course. In 2020, as part of a program conducted by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian government’s chief competition regulator, thousands of volunteers received routers to help test and report on the typical speed and performance of broadband plans in Australia. (More specifically, the Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program targeted fixed-line broadband services provided…

Google has announced its next Made By Google event, taking place on August 12 in New York City. Google’s invite doesn’t name names, but the imagery clearly shows a new Pixel phone that looks a whole lot like last year’s phone. Some new rumors, however, suggest the updated phones will come with inflated price tags courtesy of the AI-driven component shortage. The sleek lines of the phone in the teaser…

People who pay for a subscription to livestream The Weather Channel via its dedicated smart TV app are seeing a 66.7 percent price hike. The TV app, available via Android TV, Fire TV, Roku, and Samsung TVs, used to cost $3 per month, or $30 per year. According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, those prices were valid as recently as April 2026. Now, a subscription to the streaming app…

Mysterious drone flights that disrupted major European airports and flew over NATO member military bases hosting US nuclear weapons may be the work of a coordinated Kremlin campaign launched from Russian-linked commercial ships. That recent assessment from the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies used automatic identification system (AIS) maritime tracking data and other publicly available data to show how Russian-linked ships and “shadow fleet” vessels that transport sanctioned Russian…

Researchers have found a never-before-seen piece of macOS malware that combines a series of clever tradecraft to infect Macs with stealthy, custom-developed credential-stealing code. The malware is delivered in two stages. The first is distributed in a disk image that masquerades as Maccy, a clipboard manager for Macs. It’s compiled as AppleScript that is notable for the way it delivers the second stage. The malware is named PamStealer because the…