Enlarge / Filmmaker James Cameron. (credit: James Cameron / Stability AI) On Tuesday, Stability AI announced that renowned filmmaker James Cameron—of Terminator and Skynet fame—has joined its board of directors. Stability is best known for its pioneering but highly controversial Stable Diffusion series of AI image-synthesis models, first launched in 2022, which can generate images based on text descriptions. “I’ve spent my career seeking out emerging technologies that push the…

Enlarge / The Kubuntu Focus Ir14 Gen 2. (credit: Kevin Purdy) There are lots of laptops—maybe all of them—on which you can run a Linux desktop. There are a few vendors that offer laptops with extensive Linux compatibility. And then there are a select few that specialize in Linux laptops, support them, and even customize them. Kubuntu Focus is one of the select few. It sent me one of its…

Enlarge (credit: FT) China’s demand that the public sector step up use of domestic semiconductors can best be seen within Huawei’s Qingyun L540 laptop. The “safe and reliable” device features a self-designed processor and a Chinese-made operating system, having stripped out foreign-made components and software as much as possible. The computer, which is being snapped up by governments and state groups across the country, has become the signature model of…

Enlarge (credit: andresr via Getty Images) On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined his vision for an AI-driven future of tech progress and global prosperity in a new personal blog post titled “The Intelligence Age.” The essay paints a picture of human advancement accelerated by AI, with Altman suggesting that superintelligent AI could emerge within the next decade. “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Five years ago, researchers made a grim discovery—a legitimate Android app in the Google Play market that was surreptitiously made malicious by a library the developers used to earn advertising revenue. With that, the app was infected with code that caused 100 million infected devices to connect to attacker-controlled servers and download secret payloads. Now, history is repeating itself. Researchers from the same Moscow, Russia-based security…

Enlarge / The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the first iteration of a very, very long-lived phone design. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) This past weekend, I said goodbye to Apple’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6 design after 10 long years. It started with the iPhone 6 itself in 2014, a long-awaited screen size upgrade for the iPhone (some of the 2011-era Apple punditry insisting that 3.5 inches was the functionally perfect size for…

Enlarge / A photo of Dmitry Grinberg’s custom Linux/4004 circuit board. (credit: Dmitry Grinberg) Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world’s first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it’s slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot. Initially…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Juj Winn) A pleasant female voice greets me over the phone. “Hi, I’m an assistant named Jasmine for Bodega,” the voice says. “How can I help?” “Do you have patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds a little sad as she tells me that unfortunately, the San Francisco–based Vietnamese restaurant doesn’t have outdoor seating. But her sadness isn’t the result of her having a bad day….

Enlarge (credit: ChromaDev) On Saturday, a YouTube creator called “ChromaLock” published a video detailing how he modified a Texas Instruments TI-84 graphing calculator to connect to the Internet and access OpenAI’s ChatGPT, potentially enabling students to cheat on tests. The video, titled “I Made The Ultimate Cheating Device,” demonstrates a custom hardware modification that allows users of the graphing calculator to type in problems sent to ChatGPT using the keypad…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Certificate authorities and browser makers are planning to end the use of WHOIS data verifying domain ownership following a report that demonstrated how threat actors could abuse the process to obtain fraudulently issued TLS certificates. TLS certificates are the cryptographic credentials that underpin HTTPS connections, a critical component of online communications verifying that a server belongs to a trusted entity and encrypts all traffic passing between…