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…

Enlarge / Control Center has a whole new customization interface. (credit: Samuel Axon) iOS 18 launched this week, and while its flagship feature (Apple Intelligence) is still forthcoming, the new OS included two significant new buckets of customization: the home screen and Control Center. We talked about home screen a few days ago, so for our next step in our series on iOS 18, it’s now time to turn our…

Enlarge / An Anker 334 MagGo Battery (PowerCore 10K) on an iPhone. (credit: Anker) Anker is recalling three models of MagSafe iPhone batteries due to a fire risk, it said yesterday. The models being recalled are the Anker 334 MagGo Battery (PowerCore 10K, model number A1642), Anker Power Bank (model number A1647), and Anker 334 MagGo Battery (model number A1652). In its recall notice, Anker said that some of the…

Enlarge / The Windows App runs on Windows, but also macOS, iOS/iPadOS, web browsers, and Android. (credit: Microsoft) Microsoft announced today that it’s releasing a new app called Windows App as an app for Windows that allows users to run Windows and also Windows apps (it’s also coming to macOS, iOS, web browsers, and is in public preview for Android). On most of those platforms, Windows App is a replacement…