TL;DR – AI Hiring tools are racist; puts applicants into certain jobgroups; once you are rejected for a job position by one tool, that tool will very likely reject you for every other job position.
It’s graduation season and the Class of 2026 is entering one of the toughest labor markets in years. Entry-level hiring has slowed. At the same time, AI tools have made it easier than ever for job seekers to fire off applications. Together, fewer jobs and more applications mean companies are now seeing nearly three times as many applications for entry-level positions as in 2022. AI is changing not just if firms hire, but how they hire. Ninety percent of U.S. employers use AI screening tools to sort and rank job seekers, with most relying on the same few third-party vendors. When one algorithm influences many employers, what is the impact on job seekers?
We follow 3.4 million people who submit 4 million job applications to 1,700 job postings across 150 employers and 11 industry sectors. Each job application was assessed by an AI hiring tool built by a single third-party vendor. Our new paper offers a rare look inside the “black box” of algorithmic hiring, showing that these tools increase racial bias and shut the same people out of jobs everywhere they apply.
The hiring AI pipeline: Job seekers submit applications, their applications are sent to the hiring AI vendor, the vendor’s machine learning models make predictions, and the resulting labels of “recommend” or “do not recommend” are sent to the employer to inform decisions.
Surfacing racial bias at scale
We find substantial evidence of racial disparities in AI-based candidate screening. To measure adverse impact, we apply the EEOC’s “four-fifths rule,” which flags a position when one group is recommended at less than 80% of the rate of the most-recommended group — the relevant U.S. employment law (Title VII). We discovered that 26% of Black applicants and 15% of Asian applicants applied to positions where the AI system discriminated against their racial group. To put this in perspective: If the AI had recommended Black and Asian candidates at the same rate as it recommended the most-favored group (typically white applicants), 40,000 more of their applications would have advanced to the next stage of hiring.
How adverse impact is measured matters. The vendor we study screens applicants for many different positions across many employers. If we pool all of its recommendations together — treating the vendor as one giant hiring process — we don’t find adverse impact. If we look at each position separately, as would be typical in an evaluation of adverse impact, then we expose the adverse impact in many positions. For example, imagine the AI tool frequently recommends Black applicants for warehouse jobs but rarely recommends them for finance jobs. If we were to average all the jobs together, those two patterns would cancel each other out and it would seem like there is no discrimination. The big-picture average hides the real discrimination happening job by job.
Our study finds significant adverse impact on Black and Asian applicants.
Algorithmic monocultures can give rise to systemic rejection
We also study new concerns brought about by the shared dependence on a single hiring vendor. In ourpriorwork, we theorized that algorithmic monocultures in which many employers came to rely on the same algorithmic recommendations could lead to some people being shut out from jobs. Using our large dataset of real hiring AI recommendations, we test our hypothesis. We find that people who submit multiple applications to positions screened by the same algorithmic hiring vendor are more likely to be rejected from every position to which they apply than would be true if the companies made decisions statistically independently from one another. Ten percent of applicants who submit four applications are rejected from all the places to which they apply.
Our research also found that this pattern does not appear to be the case in other circumstances. We analyzed data from the largest prior study of hiring decisions, which sent 83,000 applications to 108 Fortune 500 firms during the same time period as our study and did not focus on whether AI was used to make decisions. We found that the rate at which applicants were rejected from every firm they applied to in this data was no higher than what you’d expect if each company decided independently of the others.
This suggests market concentration matters: As a single hiring vendor comes to dominate screening for an industry, it may be more likely that candidates are shut out.
We find applicants are more likely to be rejected from every position they apply to than would be predicted by the baseline of each position making statistically independent decisions.
We analyze data from the largest previous study of hiring outcomes, finding that the rate at which applicants are rejected from every position they apply to is effectively predicted by the baseline of statistically independent decisions.
AI screening tools bring together three properties that should not co-exist in high-stakes decision-making: They are pervasively adopted, highly consequential, and opaque to the public. Our research makes progress toward illuminating the consequences of AI hiring tools, but much of this technology’s impact remains unclear. This space is rapidly evolving as new tools are built using language models and agents.
The key lesson from this work is the value of and need for independent research into algorithmic hiring. Without independent research, it will be difficult to pursue evidence-based AI policy to govern AI’s impact on individual job prospects and overall workforce composition.
Heart Aerospace has announced the successful first flight of its prototype all-electric aircraft, the X1 demonstrator. X1 took off from Plattsburgh International Airport in Upstate New York and flew for 27 minutes, reaching an altitude of 1,100 feet, running entirely on its batteries. Heart added the flight, including takeoff and landing, consumed less than $5 worth of electricity, a useful selling point given the price of fuel. It has already earned praise from executives at United Airlines and Air Canada, who are interested in adding electric planes to its fleets.
If Heart is successful, the X1 will be followed by the ES-30, a fixed-wing 30-seat hybrid model designed to service regional airports. The company’s hope is that its planes can offer a far cheaper service for hopper flights currently operated by turboprop planes like the Embraer ERJ. It is aiming for an all-electric range of 125 miles, with that figure climbing to 500 miles with the hybrid engine. Heart’s broader pitch is that it won’t just be in the cheaper cost of electricity versus jet fuel that will make its plane affordable. Naturally, the cheaper maintenance and operation cost of electric motors, their better reliability will add to the balance sheet. Of more concern, perhaps, is Heart’s belief that the ES-30, while operated by a single pilot initially, will enable autonomous service in the future.
Right now, the company is aiming for the ES-30 to enter service by 2031, a date we’ll only say is “ambitious” by most plane development standards. The next decade does appear to be one in which a number of aviation startups are looking to offer their vision for the future of flight. Heart will be jostling for space alongside Boom Supersonic, Harbour Air, ZeroAvia, and Rolls-Royce. But, as we opined back in 2021, the future of electric flight is entirely dependent on batteries getting a lot denser and lighter compared to their current-day equivalents.
Nine PBS, a PBS station in St. Louis, Missouri, must be given access to data it lost when its vendor went out of business, a judge ruled this week. Nine PBS, a PBS station in St. Louis, Missouri, sued data center company Iron Mountain in July to gain access to an archive of 70 years’ worth of cultural artifacts, The Denver Post reported. The station filed its lawsuit after Iron Mountain allegedly refused to hand over data it hosted on behalf of Nine PBS’s now defunct cloud service provider Open Source Storage (OSS).
Engadget has asked Nine PBS to comment on the ruling. We’ll update this article if we hear back.
The trapped archive includes TV shows, videos, photos and other digital cultural objects relevant to St. Louis’ history, according to a copy of the lawsuit viewed by The Denver Post. In March, Nine PBS learned that Open Source Storage, its cloud storage provider, wasn’t renewing its contract, but rather than give the station 30 days to retrieve the archive, the company cut off access immediately. The station was then able to get in contact with Open Source Storage’s new owner to confirm the archive was actually safe in April.
After the owner left the company, though, the station turned to help from Iron Mountain, which physically hosted the data for Open Source Storage. At least so far, Iron Mountain has refused to hand over the data — since its contract is technically with OSS rather than Nine PBS, according to the lawsuit — prompting Nine PBS to pursue legal action.
“Iron Mountain has acted appropriately and responsibly at every step to safeguard customer data and honor our contractual commitments to OSS,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Engadget. “Throughout this process, we have been transparent with Nine PBS about our role in this dispute, that we do not have access to their data, and we have made consistent efforts to help them resolve the issue.”
In a hearing on Wednesday, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate in any way possible with Nine PBS to retrieve the data, Current reports. The judge also ruled that the station must identify a third-party vendor who can help access the data from Iron Mountain’s data center and ensure it doesn’t harm data from other OSS clients. Should the process of retrieving the data be more complicated, the judge said another hearing would be scheduled. “We appreciate the Court’s thoughtful decision establishing a path forward to access and recover our archival materials, which the Court confirmed that Nine PBS rightfully owns,” Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman told Current.
While Nine PBS is now on its way to hopefully saving its digital archive, much of this drama could have been avoided with a safer approach to data storage. The most common recommendation is to follow what’s called the “3-2-1 rule,” where you keep three copies of each file across two different mediums (like a physical hard drive and a cloud storage service), with one copy kept offsite. Following the 3-2-1 rule gives you backups if your cloud storage provider goes out of business or your physical drive dies, and means that a flood or fire that destroys one file will, barring global disaster, leave at least one copy untouched.
One of the central mysteries of the brain is how it achieves so much with so little. At any given moment, it processes an entire world of input, pilots a body and generates conscious experience—all with relatively modest energy demands. Traditionally, the brain’s 86 billion neurons are each assumed to be a single “processor,” operating as one computational unit. But for the past few decades, neuroscientists have suspected that a neuron might actually house many processors, making it far more powerful. Now researchers have found the first direct evidence of this in animals, showing that neurons’ many branches, called dendrites, can compute information independently of the cell body. The study, published in July in Science, shows that dendrites “dramatically expand” the computational capacity of individual neurons and, consequently, of the brain as a whole, says senior author Attila Losonczy, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Neurons in textbook diagrams look deceptively simple, with only a handful of dendrites extending from the cell body. In reality, they sprawl wildly into elaborate treelike arbors, allowing a single neuron to receive input from thousands of its neighbors. Scientists once thought these dendrites were little more than “boring cables” that merely passed incoming signals to the cell body for processing, Losonczy says. If this were true, each neuron would essentially be one computational unit. But dendrites’ sprawling architecture hints at a deeper purpose. “Nature puts a lot of effort and energy to maintain those branched structures,” Losonczy says. For the past 30 years, experiments on lab-grown neurons and excised brain tissue have suggested that dendrites could compute information on their own. To test the idea in living animals, Losonczy’s team used new voltage-imaging technology to record activity from parts of individual neurons in mice’s hippocampi, a brain region involved in memory and navigation. While running on miniature wheels, the mice navigated virtual environments in search of rewards.
In familiar environments, activity in the dendrites generally matched that of the cell body. And when the researchers moved the reward around within the familiar surroundings, the cell body adjusted quickly, while certain dendrites retained remnants of the earlier activity. But in an entirely new environment, some dendrites changed their activity to represent the new location before the cell body, which caught up only after repeated exploration. This suggests that the dendrites were computing information on their own, while their ability to preserve traces of the past or get ahead of the cell body raises the possibility that they serve as local “memory devices,” Losonczy says. The findings reveal how much computation might be happening within a single neuron of a living being. “Perhaps the best analogy is that a neuron itself is already a neural network,” says Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz, a neuroscientist at Cornell University, who was not involved in the new work. Losonczy also suspects that the “nice hierarchical organization” of the dendritic branches might give the brain even more computational power than simply having more neurons acting as single processors. Beverley Clark, a neuroscientist at University College London, who also wasn’t involved in the new research, thinks that dendrites computing independently allows each neuron to be “super flexible.” For her, there is more to the computational power of the brain than what we currently understand. What’s happening in the cell body captures only one part of the brain’s power. “It’s what you see across the dendritic tree that’s really important,” Clark says.
Scientists have found that wool could provide an effective and sustainable new option for repairing damaged bone.
The research focused on keratin, a natural structural protein that can be extracted from wool. When tested in a living animal, the material supported bone regeneration and produced new tissue that more closely resembled healthy, natural bone than tissue formed using the current gold standard material.
Researchers at King’s College London tested the wool-based keratin in animal models and found that it could help direct new bone growth across damaged areas.
[…]
For decades, collagen has served as the gold standard scaffold in many regenerative medical and dental applications. These scaffolds act as protective barriers during healing, keeping soft tissue from interfering with the damaged area while giving new bone space to grow.
Collagen, however, has several drawbacks. The material is relatively weak and may degrade too quickly, which can limit its usefulness when repairing bones that need to bear weight or withstand force. Extracting collagen can also be complicated and costly.
“From a research perspective this is a major milestone. It positions keratin as a potential new class of regenerative biomaterial that could challenge the long-standing reliance on collagen,” said Dr. Sherif Elsharkawy.
Testing Wool Keratin as a Bone Scaffold
To investigate whether keratin could overcome some of these limitations, the researchers created membranes from keratin extracted from wool. They chemically treated the material to produce scaffolds designed to remain stable and durable.
The membranes were first tested with human bone cells in the laboratory. The cells grew well on the material and showed clear signs associated with healthy bone formation.
Researchers then moved to animal testing. They implanted the keratin membranes into rats with skull defects that were large enough that they would not normally heal on their own. Over the following weeks, the team tracked how effectively the membranes supported new bone growth across the damaged regions.
Keratin Produced More Naturally Organized Bone
The results revealed an important difference between keratin and collagen. Collagen membranes generated a greater amount of bone overall, but the bone formed with the keratin scaffolds was more organized and structurally secure. Its fibers were also better aligned, giving the new tissue a closer resemblance to natural, healthy bone.
The keratin membranes also remained stable during the healing process and integrated smoothly with the surrounding tissue. Both characteristics are important if the material is eventually to be considered for practical medical applications.
Researchers at the University of Utah have sequenced DNA from the mushroom species Lanmaoa asiatica, isolated from both southwest China and a remote region of the Philippines, confirming that this fungus induces hallucinations that can manifest dozens or even hundreds of tiny people. But, arguably, the strangest part of their discovery is that L. asiatica contains none of the usual suspects among known psychedelic compounds, leaving the actual mechanism behind this mushroom’s fairy tale trips an ongoing biochemical mystery. “One person told me that while they were eating soup, the little people were jumping off their spoon into the bowl and swimming around.”
“People pretty much always report seeing dozens or hundreds of little people, about 3 to 30 centimeters [1 inch to 1 foot] tall, in incredible detail, like they’re actually there,” study coauthor Colin Domnauer, a doctoral student specializing in mycology at the university, said in a statement.
“About 90% of people describe them as little elves or clowns or other fairy-like figures dressed in colorful clothes,” according to Domnauer, who travelled to China’s Yunnan province and the remote Northern Cordillera region of Philippines to collect these mushroom specimens. “What’s fascinating is they interact with the physical world using the laws of physics that govern us.”
“They’re not walking through walls or anything,” Domnauer explained. “They’re falling off the edge of tables, walking around objects. One person told me that while they were eating soup, the little people were jumping off their spoon into the bowl and swimming around.”
[…]
“Our analysis showed that L. asiatica is the only psychoactive species in this genus,” Domnauer stated. “Now we’re building an evolutionary map to understand how this trait evolved and if related species produce similar compounds.”
All the little people
Domnauer had pivoted from studying planetary astronomy—including an internship with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab—to explore this psychedelic innerspace. One thing that fascinates him about these “Lilliputian hallucinations,” as the phenomenon was first named by a French psychiatrist in 1909, is how these bizarrely concrete hallucinations cross not only cultures but causal factors as well.
“People have also reported these hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal, dementia, macular degeneration and other neurological conditions,” Domnauer noted. “So, it seems like this phenomenon is fundamental to how the human mind and brain work, but we don’t know what causes it or how to treat it.”
[…]
“Now, three completely independent cultures have reported the same specific type of hallucination, and two cases are attributed to the same DNA-verified mushroom species,” he said. “That indicates that these bizarre psychological effects aren’t cultural manifestations or coincidences—they must have a shared underlying chemical and neurological basis.”
Because PMCs like Blackwater were such a great idea.
The Trump administration today unveiled a new program that will allow vetted U.S. companies to conduct cyber surveillance and offensive cyber operations against foreign transnational criminal organizations. A presidential memorandum signed August 12 directs the National Coordination Center to establish and manage the program, expanding the government’s fight against cybercrime by tapping the technical capabilities of the private sector. It builds on a March executive order that called for greater private-sector involvement, but goes significantly further by establishing a formal operational framework for the initiative.
The White House argues that American companies possess a “critical offensive cyber advantage” whose capabilities have “historically been underutilized” in efforts to identify and disrupt criminal networks operating online. There are two broad categories of authorized activity. “Cyber Surveillance Operations” can involve secretly accessing foreign information systems without authorization to gather intelligence, including information that could later be used for offensive operations. “Cyber Effects Operations,” meanwhile, can result in the “manipulation, disruption, denial, degradation, or destruction” of information systems, networks, or infrastructure.
It’s worth noting that companies will not be free to launch their own operations. The memorandum requires program officials to “review every cyber operations package and provide written approval and direction” before a participating company can act. Operations that could cause death or serious injury, or “rise to the level of use of force or armed attack under international law,” are classified as “Critical Outcomes” and cannot be approved through the standard process. The program includes safeguards requiring companies to halt and report operations that unintentionally affect U.S. persons or systems, as well as any imminent threats to critical infrastructure.
It’s likely many of us have been in the position of first set-up on a machine such as a Raspberry Pi, and had keyboard problems. Either no spare keyboard is to be found, or a cluttered desk has to find extra space for a full-size keyboard. [Henk] has a handy solution, use the existing keyboard on your laptop.
His approach is both ingenious and simple, as it’s only the K part of a KVM. On the laptop end, it’s a serial terminal, without the receiving side. The serial port in question is an RP2040 board which implements a USB-to-serial port. This serial connection goes to another RP2040, which does the ingenious bit. It’s a serial-to-USB HID keyboard. All of this means that keystrokes on the laptop are sent down the serial connection, and appear on the Pi or whatever computer as a USB keyboard as though typed locally. The mildly annoying first set-up can be done, and then it can be run via SSH or whatever other remote access protocol as normal. The code is provided, so anyone with a couple of RP2040 boards can do it.
We like this hack, because we’ve had the annoyance of needing a keyboard to set up what would otherwise be a completely headless machine too many times. It’s one to store away at the back of your mind, for those rare improvisational need-an-extra-keyboard moments.
The Honor Robot Phone has been on our radar for a while now and it’s finally available to preorder, though just in China for now. The “robot” in the name refers primarily to the automated pop-up camera gimbal, which does seem like a boon for photographers and videographers.
This gimbal is made from titanium and can move in various directions, including a full 360-degree rotation. This obviously allows people to get difficult shots that normal smartphones would struggle with. It supports a wide range of cinematic movement modes. These include a tilt lock, FPV view and a spinshot, among others.
There’s an integrated AI algorithm for subject tracking, in which the camera will automatically pan and tilt to follow someone. There’s also hands-free gesture control, which can be used to deploy the camera arm and capture shots.
The specs of the actual camera system are pretty impressive. The rear setup includes a dual 200MP camera system, with a 200MP main lens and a 200MP telephoto lens. Honor has also teamed up with a company called Arri, which is a manufacturer of professional cinema cameras. This partnership provides even more tools to budding videographers, like AI-assisted noise reduction and a larger dynamic range. Footage can also be previewed in real-time and can be output as RAW files.
The phone runs on MagicOS and introduces something called the YOYO Robot Mode, which combines “multimodal perception, contextual understanding, gesture recognition and physical movement.” In other words, the camera gimbal has been anthropomorphized a bit. We attended a hands-off demo back in March in which the cute little robo-cam danced to songs, wiggled its head in agreement and rotated on command.
Honor promises that it’s opening up the platform to third-party developers, so they will theoretically be able to capitalize on the multimodal capabilities of the phone. The company says third parties will likely “create new experiences using its gimbal, perception and embodied-interaction capabilities.” A robot phone lays on its front. Honor
Of course, this is also a smartphone and not just a cute little camera that wiggles every now and again. The specs are decent. The Robot Phone features a Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 chip with a custom-built cooling system and a beefy 7,060mAh battery. There’s a 6.3-inch OLED display that supports adaptive refresh rates, with a peak brightness of 6,800 nits.
It’s available to preorder right now in two configurations. There’s one with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage and another with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Shipments and official sales begin on August 18. As previously mentioned, the Honor Robot Phone is currently only available in China. In US dollars, the 12GB model costs around $1,480 and the 16GB version comes in at $2,075. Hey, robot gimbals aren’t cheap.
When SpaceX filed for its IPO, we went through the S-1 to point out just how far off the mark Elon Musk’s predictions about his Twitter takeover turned out to be. Indeed, the failure of Twitter as a business was so catastrophic, Musk had to hide it by merging all his Xs together: he had xAI buy X (formerly Twitter), and then had SpaceX buy xAI. But when Musk was buying Twitter and needed investors, he made bold promises about how he would succeed — promises the media and his investors treated as perfectly reasonable. He said he would take Twitter’s ad revenue from $4.5 billion in 2021 to $12 billion in 2027 (and then also many more billions in subscription revenue).
Now that SpaceX is a public company, he has to report some of that revenue, though it’s all merged and buried in footnotes. But there’s enough info in there to show that advertising revenue is way, way below what it was when he took over the site. And it’s shrinking.
In the 10-Q, all of X’s revenue is now (misleadingly) labeled “AI” revenue, but even then the reporting has to admit ad revenue took a big hit, dropping $160 million compared to the first half of 2025 (which was already way, way, way lower than when Elon took over the site), going from $870 million in 2025 to $710 million in the first half of 2026. The company tries to claim that this decrease in ad revenue is because they “transitioned to a new advertising platform which impacted ad sales for a short period of time.” Which is a curious explanation, given that on the analyst call, CFO Bret Johnsen credited that very same “overhauled” ad-tech platform for the very slight quarter-over-quarter uptick in ad revenue. The same overhaul apparently both tanked the business and rescued it, depending on which direction the number was moving.
And even the claim that the overhaul increased ad revenue is suspicious given that if you compare the 2nd quarter from last year to this year… ad revenue dropped from $426 million to $367 million, year over year. Some overhaul.
I kinda think that if your transition to a new ad platform decreases ad sales by $160 million, someone fucked up badly somewhere. Especially when it’s a nearly 20% year-over-year drop.
Let’s break all this down: In the second quarter of 2022, the last full quarter before Elon took over, Twitter brought in $1.08 billion in ad revenue. In the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million. That’s $713 million a quarter, gone. Elon has wiped out two-thirds of Twitter’s ad business over the exact period in which he promised investors he’d nearly triple it.
And it’s not for lack of trying. Over the past year X has made a ton of experiments and revamps to improve the experience (though the main person in charge of all that, just left). I’d argue that the company was just rebuilding all of the stuff Elon killed after first taking over the company, but none of it has brought advertisers back.
Still, it seems like someone should be pointing out how far off the mark Elon has been. He promised twelve billion dollars in ad revenue within the next year. That’s three billion a quarter. X just did $367 million — about an eighth of the pace, and shrinking. You can talk all you want about his rockets and robots, he’s not magically going to grow ad revenue 700% in the next 18 months.
Cameras aboard Royal Navy drone boats were found phoning home to an IP address in China during a routine cyber vulnerability assessment.
The UK Ministry of Defence confirmed the discovery, describing it as “an issue affecting a Kraken Unmanned Surface Vessel sub-system used by the Royal Navy.”
The Register understands that the data consisted of a “heartbeat” signalling that the camera was online and functioning normally. Even so, an unexpected transmission from military equipment to an IP address in China will rattle nerves. We contacted unmanned surface vessel supplier Kraken for more information, but have yet to receive a reply.
An MoD spokesperson told The Reg: “A thorough investigation found no evidence of MoD data or systems being accessed, compromised or transmitted externally.”
“Our assurance and testing processes are designed to identify and address potential vulnerabilities early, and we continue to undertake routine security activity across our systems and equipment.”
According to reports, the talkative components were cameras sourced by Kraken from a third-party supplier. The incident raises questions about supply chains, audits, and cybersecurity in the British armed forces.
The spokesperson said: “The first duty of government is national security, and we take the security of our equipment, networks, and data extremely seriously.”
Concerns about China-linked cyber activity have risen sharply in recent years. In April, the National Cyber Security Centre issued a security advisory regarding covert networks, built from compromised routers and other edge devices. Beijing is also rarely far from the headlines when spying and covert operations are involved. In January, a China-linked group was accused of spying on the phones of aides to UK prime ministers.
An unexpected connection from military hardware to China is therefore concerning, even if it carried little more than an “I’m alive!” heartbeat. The incident also demonstrates why every component in a defense supply chain needs testing rather than relying on a supplier’s assurances. ®
Microsoft’s cloud storage app OneDrive got a new Photos app in the worst possible way, reports the blog Neowin . “The app is reportedly showing up even on Windows 11 Enterprise machines, despite apparently being a beta application aimed at consumer functionality.” One admin questioned why a beta app was appearing on an Enterprise SKU in the first place, while another described the situation as yet another consumer-oriented feature being forced onto corporate PCs. Things get even more frustrating for IT departments because there does not appear to be a straightforward Microsoft-provided way to disable the app… Enterprise administrators generally need to know what is being installed on their managed devices, particularly when a software is labeled as beta. Quietly adding another application and leaving admins to clean it up themselves is therefore unlikely to win Microsoft many fans. But there’s another problem, according to the blog Windows Latest. “OneDrive Photos automatically scans your system storage for photos,” and apparently “doesn’t need a Microsoft account to work, as it can also detect your local files.” There’s also a People section that groups similar faces in your photos. Microsoft asks for permission before turning it on and explicitly warns that facial data could be considered biometric data in some regions. The company says only you can see the grouped faces, that the data isn’t shared with third parties, and that you can delete it by disabling the feature. In a statement to Neowin, Microsoft admitted this new photos “experience” they’re “incubating” had gone “more broadly than it should have,” and then promised that “We’re fixing that.” The spokesperson also said the Windows Photos app will “always give you the option of local and cloud photos” and, also a choice of whether or not to use it OneDrive.”
But there’s another “awkward catch,” notes the blog Digital Trends. “Users currently can’t uninstall OneDrive Photos without removing the main OneDrive app too.” Because OneDrive Photos is tied to the main OneDrive sync client, Windows 11 doesn’t currently offer a separate uninstall option. The only straightforward way to get rid of OneDrive Photos right now is to uninstall OneDrive itself… Removing the main client can also affect its File Explorer integration and shortcuts…
Microsoft says this will change. The company is working on controls that will let users remove OneDrive Photos separately from the main OneDrive app. On enterprise PCs managed through Intune, Microsoft says the app will automatically disappear where it isn’t supported.
Modern browsers on iOS and macOS were found to leak real user IPs despite the use of built-in proxy configurations. Users of Apple iCloud Private Relay and even Tor browsers are affected, according to a report by Mysk.
WebKit, the core rendering engine for browsers in the Apple ecosystem, disregards proxy configurations and often sends requests to DNS servers or websites directly, revealing real users’ IPs and jeopardizing any efforts to stay private online. Only device-level VPNs are unaffected.
The startling discovery was made by Mysk, a team of two developers, Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk, building privacy-preserving apps for Apple platforms.
“Three WebKit features – DNS prefetching, WebAuthn Related Origin Requests, and WebTransport – that bypass the configured proxy and send traffic directly from the device, which exposes the user’s real network. The same leaks also affect Apple’s iCloud Private Relay,” the Mysk report warns.
Peak Energy, a U.S. leader in low-cost, giga-scale grid storage, today announced it has selected Sacramento, California as the home of its new manufacturing facility, becoming America’s first dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion energy storage systems. The 183,000-square-foot facility will produce up to 4 GWh of battery systems annually, enough to power nearly four million homes per year. Peak announced the milestone alongside regional and state leaders, marking a major investment in California manufacturing and America’s energy future.
With more than 6 GWh of customer commitments already in place, Peak’s Sacramento facility will help the United States meet the rapidly increasing energy storage demand, fueled by the expansion of AI and data centers, while advancing energy security and domestic manufacturing. Peak’s passively cooled sodium-ion battery energy storage systems, which reduce the cost of energy storage by 20% and have a 99% guaranteed uptime, are expected to enter production and begin shipments in Q1 2027.
[…]
Located in Sacramento’s Metro Air Park, the new facility represents up to $71 million in capital investment and will create 239 new local jobs over the next 18 months, with an average annual wage of more than $90,000. The project is also expected to generate additional economic activity for local suppliers, contractors, logistics providers and service businesses throughout the Sacramento region, while expanding the local tax base and supporting long-term community investment. Together with Peak’s broader growth in California, the company is expected to create 348 net new jobs across Sacramento and Burlingame, where it is headquartered, by 2030.
[…]
To date, Peak has secured customer agreements with Jupiter Power, Energy Vault and RWE Americas and recently announced a strategic partnership with General Motors, including an investment from GM Ventures, to pair GM’s next-generation sodium-ion cell technology with Peak’s proprietary energy storage platform.
The first time I saw it, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. A northern white-cheeked gibbon at Shanghai Zoo was holding and caressing a mouse that had wandered into its enclosure. It wasn’t trying to eat it or chase it away. Instead, the gibbon treated the tiny rodent with remarkable gentleness. I couldn’t stop wondering why.
Years later, while studying wild black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys in the mountains of south-west China, I watched playful juveniles repeatedly trying to climb onto the backs of domestic pigs. Again, these weren’t the kinds of interactions I expected to see between different species.
A new study my colleagues and I conducted brings together 427 documented cases of primates interacting with other species, spanning several decades from the 1970s to 2025. Our findings reveal that these encounters are far more widespread than scientists had realized.
Over the years, I had begun collecting reports of similar encounters from scientific journals, photographs, videos and observations shared by other primatologists. What initially seemed like a handful of quirky anecdotes gradually turned into a much broader pattern. These interactions appeared to represent a surprisingly widespread aspect of primate behavior.
[…]
our study focused on social interactions.
The cases we reviewed involved 88 primate species and their interactions with 127 other animal species. The diversity of these species was astonishing. It included mammals such as sheep, tapir, deer, domestic pigs, cats and dogs, as well as owls, lizards, toads and even insects.
The most common behavior was play and grooming. But we also found reports of primates carrying, huddling and sharing food with and occasionally adopting members of another species. Most interactions were initiated by the primates themselves.
[…]
Why would a langur stroke a squirrel, or macaques groom stray dogs? Such interactions suggest that primates may possess a broader capacity for social flexibility, curiosity and tolerance towards other species than researchers previously appreciated.
We also found consistent patterns in who interacted. Young primates were much more likely to play with members of another species, whereas adult females were more often involved in grooming. This mirrors well-established age and sex differences in many primate societies, where juveniles spend much of their time playing and females often invest more heavily in caregiving.
It would be tempting to describe all these encounters as examples of friendship. But the reality is more complicated. Some primates carried infants of another species in ways resembling adoption or caregiving, yet rough handling or neglect sometimes resulted in injury or death. We also documented cases where primates appeared to abduct a young animal from its group, while a small number of interactions were clearly abusive, involving violence.
Most interactions were probably of relatively short duration. However, there are some reports of cases that lasted for weeks. For example, the adoption of a marmoset by a capuchin monkey.
In zoos and other human-care settings, some species appear to form long-lasting relationships with animals of other species. In 2017, a macaque living in an Israeli zoo called Niv adopted a chicken and treated it like it was her own baby.
Our study found these interactions were not more common among great apes – they occurred across all major primate lineages.
The track record is not good, with SpaceX managing to mis Mars entirely with their Tesla Roadster in 2018 (SpaceX Roadster skips Mars, steers to asteroids, central core booster explodes), Starship’s explosions, Starlink satellites hitting other objects in space and degrading continuously, now they’re accidentally ramming the moon.
On Wednesday, August 5th, at 06:35 UTC (11:35 p.m. PDT; 2:35 a.m. EDT), a 13.8-meter (45-ft) long, 4,000 kg (9,000 lbs) spent upper stage once belonging to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket struck the Moon. The upper stage (designated object ) is a leftover piece of the rocket that launched Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s HAKUTO-R M2 “Resilience,”, two lunar landers that launched in January 2025. The spent stage struck the western “lunar limb,” close to the Einstein Crater on the moon’s dayside while traveling at roughly 8,700 km/h (5,400 mph).
Before the impact, scientists estimated that the upper stage would create a crater measuring 20 to 27 meters (65 to 89 feet) in diameter and 4 meters (12 to 13 feet) in depth. While no images of the collision were captured, the plume created by the impact was observable to viewers with the right equipment. In addition, astronomers at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile also provided spectroscopic data of the region, which noted the presence of lithium and sodium kicked up from the impact.
This dust dissipated within minutes of the impact, and images of the impact crater were captured afterward by the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) mission (also known as Danuri). “Danuri began observations about 30 minutes before the collision and, through orbit control, passed over the impact site multiple times, conducting a total of 8 imaging sessions,” said officials with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) on the morning of August 6th. “Through this observation, changes in the terrain around the impact site and traces of ejecta spread were confirmed.”
A satellite image shows the impact site of the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket after it smashed into the moon on Aug. 5. Credit: KARI/KASA/Reuters
Scientists have created the first quantum material that can sort and transport different quantum states of light at room temperature, potentially removing the need for bulky, ultra-cold refrigeration systems. Built from a gold film carved with hundreds of microscopic structures, the ultrathin “metacrystal” acts like a filter that directs different kinds of quantum light along separate paths while preserving the information they carry.
[…]
Credit: LSU Quantum Photonics Group
Almost every quantum material discovered so far works only when cooled to temperatures near absolute zero. At ordinary temperatures, heat causes atoms to vibrate constantly. Those vibrations disrupt the fragile quantum effects researchers want to control.
Suppressing this motion typically requires large cryogenic refrigeration systems. As a result, quantum materials can perform remarkable tasks in carefully controlled laboratories, but they are difficult and expensive to use in real-world devices.
A Quantum Material That Works at Room Temperature
LSU physicists have now created the first room-temperature quantum material able to identify and transport distinct quantum states of light. The advance, reported in Nature, addresses one of the most significant barriers in quantum materials research.
[…]
Building an Artificial Quantum Crystal
Instead of searching nature for a substance with the needed properties, the LSU team chose to engineer one from the ground up.
The researchers began by placing a thin layer of gold on a glass chip. They then used focused ion beams to cut hundreds of extremely small slits into the metal. Each slit functions like an artificial atom, or meta-atom.
Together, these meta-atoms create a crystal unlike anything found naturally. The completed structure is also thinner than a human hair.
When light reaches the chip, it moves across the gold surface and interacts with the engineered meta-atoms. By precisely adjusting the size, shape, and spacing of those structures, the researchers gained control over how the material responds to light.
The result was a form of light manipulation that had never previously been achieved at room temperature.
“By engineering the distribution of meta-atoms in the plasmonic metacrystal, we can systematically dictate which quantum statistics are allowed to pass through the structure. So, our crystal essentially acts as a statistical filter on quantum states,”
[…]
Sorting Different Quantum States of Light
Light does not always behave in the same way.
Sunlight, laser light, and fluorescent light are all made of photons. However, the photons in each type of light fluctuate and interact in different ways. These small variations influence how the light behaves at the quantum level.
Until now, identifying those differences has generally required complex equipment, detectors cooled to extremely low temperatures, and millions of individual measurements.
The new metacrystal performs the sorting process on its own. Rather than reacting only to familiar properties such as color or intensity, it detects subtle quantum distinctions in the incoming light.
It then directs different quantum states along separate routes through the crystal.
These routes also allow certain quantum states to move through the material while undergoing fewer changes to their statistics. Those statistics are the defining characteristics that distinguish one quantum state from another.
“We call this robust transport,” Magaña-Loaiza said. “These quantum states carry information. Our crystal can distinguish them and move them from one point to another in a robust way without requiring cryogenic cooling. That’s what opens the door to practical quantum technologies.”
Physicists refer to this shared quantum behavior as quantum coherence. Maintaining coherence is one of the most difficult problems in quantum information science because interactions with the surrounding environment can quickly destroy it.
In the Nature study, the team describes the metacrystal as the first room-temperature quantum material inherently sensitive to the quantum coherence of many-body systems.
[…]
The team also found that the metacrystal naturally produces structures they call quantum statistical bands.
These bands are similar in concept to the electronic band structures that control how electricity travels through semiconductors. In the new material, however, the bands govern the movement and statistical behavior of quantum states of light.
By changing how the meta-atoms are arranged, researchers can select which quantum states pass through the material without being altered and which states undergo statistical changes.
This level of control represents a major shift in how quantum materials can be developed. Scientists no longer have to depend entirely on finding naturally occurring substances with useful properties. They can instead design materials that guide quantum states in deliberate and predictable ways.
The findings therefore provide a general blueprint for building many future quantum materials, rather than offering only one isolated discovery.
Microplastics, which are plastic particles under 5 millimeters, are a major and growing threat in both soil and water. They damage soil fertility, disrupt nutrient cycling, harm aquatic and terrestrial life, and can move through the food chain. That makes cleaning them up an urgent priority.
However, that is not an easy task. In soil, for example, these small particles become tightly trapped between soil minerals and organic matter and are exceptionally difficult to extract. But a solution may be on the way.
Microrobots to the rescue
Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials.
To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots.
Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil.
“In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them,” the study authors commented in their paper.
As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples.
They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.
Future challenges
While the results were promising, the tests were carried out in a lab. Field trials will be needed to evaluate how well the approach works under real-world conditions. There are also potential risks that will have to be addressed, such as leaching metal ions and possibly incomplete magnetic retrieval. However, the team believes its microrobotic platform could be valuable in the years to come.
“This microrobotic cleanup platform represents a versatile and sustainable strategy for active pollutant decontamination in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.”
Oura Rings, Garmin GPS fitness watches, Apple Watches, Whoop bands—every year, more and more tech devices are promising to monitor our health and fitness, guide us toward healthier living, and provide useful health metrics to take to our doctors. But few of these tools provide the sorts of privacy and security promises we demand from all technology, let alone tech that captures personal health data. It’s time they step up and start providing transparency reports and stronger encryption options.
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The companies who make these devices can and do collect an abundance of data, and many of them share that data with third-parties for marketing or to influence insurance rates, or use it for their own purposes, like training artificial intelligence models.
Health data is increasingly an important part of law enforcement or government investigations. Wearable data has been critical in a number of cases, where information about heart rate and steps was used to determine the whereabouts of individuals. And the surveillance company Penlink calls fitness trackers and wearables an “overlooked source” for law enforcement since they tend to show movement patterns and changes in heart rates. Law enforcement can try to get access to this data through subpoenas or warrants.
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here we are choosing to focus on two facets we’re concerned with around health data itself: 1) whether the company shares information with law enforcement and governments and 2) if they offer end-to-end encryption, which means the company itself can’t access that health data to begin with.
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Companies should provide transparency reports of how often they provide data to the government, including information about whether it’s an official demand or an unofficial request. We have been calling on tech companies to publish transparency reports for a long time, but the practice is still rare across the industry. That’s especially true with fitness gadgets.
Only two of the companies we surveyed, Apple and Google (which also owns Fitbit), currently publish transparency reports. Apple, Google, and Whoop promise to notify users of law enforcement requests in publicly available documentation.
Oura now does too, after an update to their privacy policy in June 2026 that was perhaps prompted by a series of requests from journalist Zack Whittaker. In that same update and in an email to us, Oura promises that it is “actively evaluating ways to provide greater visibility into how we handle these requests, like through a transparency report.” This is promising, and we hope the company agrees that transparency reports are the best option moving forward.
[…]
Support for end-to-end encryption is more rare than transparency reports.
The Apple Watch, at least with data that’s stored in the Health app, is the only popular fitness wearable that supports end-to-end encryption, and it’s enabled by default for all users (you are required to have two-factor authentication enabled as well, but that is also on by default for most accounts).
However, Apple Watch owners should remember that this protection is only for data stored in the Apple Health app. If you use other apps on your watch, or choose to share data with third-parties, like Strava, or if you’re sharing data with other wearables, like an Oura ring, that data is likely not end-to-end encrypted by the third-party company.
And that’s it. Apple is the only one.
[…]
Not Google. Not Garmin. Not Oura. Most of these companies instead offer encryption in transit and at rest, but this means those companies can still see and use your data.
[…]
Another option would be more robust local-storage options. Some devices we looked at, like a handful of Garmin and Polar watches, can operate on the watch itself without syncing data to the cloud, but some models are limited in capability and cannot sync to an app without storing data online. More robust options for limiting the data to just the wearable and the phone app it’s synced to would be a privacy improvement. For example, the Apple Watch has the option to disable iCloud sharing in Apple Health, which will keep the data only on your phone. It’s the only wearable we found that offers this feature without using a third-party app like Gadgetbridge or by physically connecting the wearable to a computer with a USB cable and transferring activity files over manually.
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If you’re a user of a fitness wearable from any of the companies we’ve reached out to, or any other one, don’t be shy in asking for these sorts of features. In the rare cases a company offers a feature request page, use it—like for Garmin, Polar, Suunto, and Whoop. And when those types of outlets aren’t offered, don’t shy away from general contact pages, like those offered by Amazfit and Oura, or on community subreddits.
[…]
Health data is some of the most personal data we produce, and most wearables companies are behind the times when it comes to basic privacy practices and transparency. Now’s the time to improve those practices.
Nearly half of dementia cases may be connected to risk factors that people can potentially change, including smoking and high blood pressure. New research from Lund University has identified how specific risk factors are associated with Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, the two most common causes of dementia.
A person’s dementia risk is shaped partly by factors that cannot be altered, including age, gender and genetics. Other influences may be modifiable, such as smoking, cardiovascular disease, high blood lipids, physical activity, alcohol consumption, hearing loss and high blood pressure.
Dementia is not a single disease. It is a collection of symptoms that can result from several different disorders, which means the risks may vary depending on the underlying cause. Researchers at Lund University examined how individual risk factors are connected to brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.
“Much of the research available on the risk factors that we ourselves can influence does not take into account the different causes of dementia. This means that we have had limited knowledge of how individual risk factors affect the underlying disease mechanisms in the brain,” explains Sebastian Palmqvist, senior lecturer in neurology at Lund University and senior physician at the Memory Clinic at Skåne University Hospital.
Researchers Tracked Brain Changes for Four Years
The study involved almost 500 participants who had an average age of 65 and showed no signs of cognitive impairment. Researchers followed them for four years, measuring changes in the brain’s white matter, the nerve fibers that are often damaged in vascular dementia.
The team also monitored levels of amyloid β and tau, two proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Their goal was to determine how both modifiable and nonmodifiable risk factors were related to changes in the brain over time.
Vascular Risks Were Linked to White Matter Damage
Most of the modifiable factors examined, including smoking, cardiovascular disease, high blood lipids and high blood pressure, were associated with damage to blood vessels in the brain. They were also linked to a more rapid buildup of changes in white matter.
“We saw that most modifiable risk factors — smoking, cardiovascular disease, high blood lipids and high blood pressure, among others — were linked to damage to the brain’s blood vessels and a faster accumulation of so-called white matter changes. This damage impairs the function of the blood vessels and leads to vascular brain damage – and can ultimately lead to vascular dementia,” says Isabelle Glans, doctoral student at Lund University and resident in neurology at Skåne University Hospital.
The researchers also identified possible connections between certain risk factors and the proteins involved in Alzheimer’s disease.
“Diabetes was associated with increased accumulation of amyloid β, while people with lower BMI had faster accumulation of tau. However, these findings need to be investigated further and validated in future studies,” continues Isabelle Glans.
Healthy Habits May Reduce Multiple Forms of Damage
Adopting healthier habits and addressing modifiable risks may help delay the appearance of Alzheimer’s symptoms. This may be especially important because many people with dementia have more than one type of disease process occurring in the brain, including both vascular damage and Alzheimer’s related changes.
Palmqvist said that improving vascular and metabolic health may therefore remain valuable even for people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Focusing on vascular and metabolic risk factors can still help reduce the combined effects of several brain changes that occur simultaneously,” he concludes.
Platform engineering didn’t emerge from a whiteboard — it emerged from pain. The DevOps era gave us shared ownership and the cultural conviction that “you build it, you run it”. Platform Engineering 1.0 systematized that foundation into golden paths, self-service Internal Development Platforms (IDPs), and platform-as-product thinking. Today, 90% of organizations have adopted platforms according to the 2025 Google DORA report, making a high-quality internal platform the essential foundation for AI success. That success, however, is also the setup for what comes next.
The Ceiling is Real
Platform Engineering 1.0 was built for a specific need: containerized workloads, developer-centric teams, and human-paced delivery.
Several structural limitations now constrain Platform Engineering 1.0. The architecture is AI-blind — with no first-class support for GPU and TPU provisioning, model serving, model registries, MCP gateways, or AI-specific governance. The developer-only focus leaves entire organizations underserved: ML engineers, data scientists, FinOps analysts, security teams, and AI agents all need the platform. Cost management is reactive, with cloud waste sitting at an industry baseline of 35% as per KPMG — and AI infrastructure and token costs amplifying it further. Security and compliance remain afterthoughts, treated as bolt-ons rather than substrate properties. Platforms have become rigid and static: compliance is a snapshot rather than a continuous guarantee, and swapping one component may cascade changes across the entire stack.
The established foundations Platform Engineering 1.0 remain stable. But the platform must now carry workloads for which it was not designed for. Left unaddressed, the platform that was designed to eliminate the bottleneck becomes the bottleneck itself.
Forces Driving the Next Evolution
The pressure on current platforms is not theoretical. Multiple converging forces have accelerated the structural strain.
With many developers using AI coding assistants and code volumes rising, the bottleneck has decisively shifted from writing code to delivering it. Simultaneously, AI agents are moving from research projects to enterprise workloads at exponential pace — and unlike every prior persona, they arrive with no existing platform support to inherit from. Cloud waste meets expensive AI infrastructure, creating CFO-level budget surprises that boards can no longer ignore. The EU AI Act, US executive orders on AI safety, and expanding data-residency requirements impose compounding compliance pressures on a platform never architected for them. And the platform engineering team — once focused on developers — is now being asked to serve the entire organization.
Infrastructure is not a supporting concern in modern platform engineering — it is the strategic foundation that determines how far any platform evolution can go.
The Five Pillars of Platform Engineering 2.0
The time has come for Platform Engineering 2.0. This is not a rebuild; it is a deliberate extension of what 1.0 established, across five fundamental pillars.
The emergence of the AI-Native Platform transforms the IDP into an Agentic Development Platform (ADP), adding GPU and TPU provisioning with dynamic allocation policies, model-serving infrastructure with versioned registries, MCP server infrastructure for agent-tool integration, and isolated execution environments with bounded autonomy guardrails. AI is both the forcing function and the opportunity. AI workloads and agents become native to the platform.
Multi-Persona Experience extends platform capabilities from developers and platform engineers to four new distinct personas — data scientists, security teams, engineering and business stakeholders, and AI agents — each requiring the right tools, the right abstractions, and the right intelligence. The discipline that built the platform for developer autonomy now builds the platform for enterprise-wide agentic autonomy.
Embedded FinOps moves cost intelligence from rear-view-mirror reporting to provisioning-time decisioning. Every developer and operator becomes a FinOps practitioner by default — not through training, but through platform design that surfaces cost at the point of action. A FinOps capability operating above the infrastructure layer can only report on spend; one embedded at the infrastructure layer can control it.
Security Shifts Down addresses the entirely new category of AI security challenges — shadow AI sprawl, prompt injection, model poisoning, and inference data leaks — that developer tooling alone cannot catch. Security embeds into infrastructure itself, not as an overlay, but as an immutable substrate property. It complements the shift-left security that Platform Engineering 1.0 established.
Composable Architecture by Design answers the pace of change across a 200+ project CNCF ecosystem and many new commercial tools. The future of platform engineering is not build versus buy — it is compose. API-first, repaveable building blocks connected through well-defined contracts deliver the architectural flexibility that AI workloads and rapid experimentation demand.
Infrastructure Is the Platform’s Most Foundational Layer
At the heart of every platform engineering initiative lies infrastructure — the foundational substrate of compute, storage, networking, GPU resources, automation and embedded security and cost controls that makes everything else possible. A modernised infrastructure runs through all five pillars as the unifying substrate: what the AI-Native Platform provisions for GPU and model workloads, the foundation that Embedded FinOps governs and optimizes, the enforcement layer where Security Shifts Down becomes immutable and invisible, and the composable building blocks that give architecture the flexibility to adapt at AI’s pace. No pillar delivers its full value without a modern, capable infrastructure layer beneath it.
The Call to Action
Platform Engineering 2.0 is AI-native, multi-persona, cost-aware, secure by construction, and composable by design. The starting point is honest self-assessment: which ceiling is creating the most friction in your organization today? Audit your platform against the five pillars, mandate a business case tied to developer velocity, cloud cost reduction, and AI readiness metrics, and commit to infrastructure as a first-class strategic concern. The platforms that evolve will define the enterprises that lead.
AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm’s boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content.
We only have one documented example so far, and that’s Time serving AI-only ads to selected AI crawlers, as spotted by Germany-based freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach. In a Wednesday blog post, Schmalbach detailed how he found sponsored content embedded in markdown versions of some Time pages that are served to AI crawlers but not ordinary browsers.
Those pages also contained advertising tags from adtech vendor Mobian ahead of extensive FAQs for online-only bank Ally. The FAQs include brand “facts,” such as the number of fee-free ATMs associated with the branchless bank, alongside claims that Ally is “the only bank built for life today,” putting it in “a category of one.”
Key “brand fact” statements that make for great regurgitable facts are also included in the AI-only advertisement, as are answers to questions like “is Ally good for everyday banking,” “can you deposit cash at Ally Bank,” and the like. The FAQ is flagged as sponsored content on the markdown page, but it doesn’t change the fact that the entire thing is written like it was designed to be spit back out by a chatbot in response to specific questions.
Not all web crawlers are getting these markdown ads either. Per Schmalbach, Google’s standard search indexing bot doesn’t see the ads, as it just gets the same HTML that a human gets.
“Only the [chatbot] assistant crawlers get the forked version,” he wrote. That means user-agents including ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot receive the sponsored markdown, while Google’s standard search crawler gets the same HTML served to ordinary browsers. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, which OpenAI uses for model training and user-initiated retrieval respectively, return HTTP 406 errors in Schmalbach’s tests, while OAI-SearchBot receives the markdown version used to support ChatGPT Search.
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As Schmalbach points out in his writeup, this could be “the first clear look at what the web starts to become when the main audience is AI models,” which is a threshold we’ve already crossed.
Why advertise to humans when you can make AI do it for you?
It’s not clear whether Time’s strategy of advertising to AI crawlers has been adopted by other publishers, but it’d be a shock if others weren’t at least considering it.
[…]
a quote from Mobian CEO and co-founder Jonah Goodhart that makes the objective clear, however: The company’s aim is to shape what AI assistants say about the brands paying for the service.
“When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do,” Goodhart told Digiday. “With a human you influence one person.”
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In other words, you soon may not be able to tell which results in an AI powered search are legitimately being surfaced because of being good products, and which are just gaming the system. It’s the early days of the SEO race all over again, only this time fooling the indexers is as easy as handing any old idiot the same pamphlet over and over again until its content becomes truth. ®
You’ve heard it a million times: A car is often the second-most-expensive purchase a person will ever make. It’s never been truer than today. With skyrocketing costs and expensive credit (not to mention other factors) driving up prices across the board, shoppers are desperate for options that won’t break the bank. So, how are automakers responding to this clamor? By trying to milk even more money from their customers, of course.
I’m 42; I grew up in the era of “bean counters.” These nefarious little nannies were blamed for every cool model that didn’t make it to our shores, and every sweet performance option left on the table (not to mention every part that fell off of an American car built between 1979 and 1999). They were nothing but thieves of joy, cutting costs at the expense of fun—the boogeymen in the back room telling the engineers that we weren’t allowed to have fun.
I never thought I’d speak of that era with any sort of fondness, but here we are, in 2026, and the accounting autocracy of the late 20th century seems like a paradise next to the Black Mirror-verse slowly settling in around us. Our latest reminder of just how much everything sucks right now comes from BMW (by way of @metav3rse on Instagram).
Yep, that’s a promotional spot for Spider-Man… and the iX3, somehow? And done in soft, friendly tones intended to soothe you. It’s a cute, cuddly, entirely innocuous little clip in the same vein of Google’s search doodles—remember when those still felt harmless? It’s fine if you don’t; that moment passed nearly a decade ago.
The Bavarians aren’t strictly alone in this strategy, broadly speaking. Jeep is doing it, and even Toyota will try to up-sell you on a subscription for its infotainment service using its touchscreen real estate. But the example before us is particularly egregious, especially since it’s not simply selling you on BMW parts or accessories. It’s a full-blown ad for a non-automotive product—a movie, of all things.
This strikes me as the sort of thing a marketing type might call a “cross-promotional opportunity” rather than “advertisement,” but that really means you’re watching not one but two separate ads: one for a Marvel movie and the other for BMW. I expect there’s also some sort of BMW product placement within the movie itself (sure enough), which is yet another billboard for further euphemistically labeled corporate revenue orgies. Mmmmm… can’t you just smell all that synergy!?
I get that automakers still have accountants to please and shareholders to satisfy, but this sort of naked greed serves no one but the MBAs patting each other on the back for their clever little play. Enough is enough. Get this off our screens.
No word on where it sends your data to and if it requires a subscription
Casio has unveiled the CRW-H001M-8 Ring Watch, a wearable that blends the look of a miniature digital watch with the functionality of a smart ring. While most smart rings rely entirely on smartphone apps to display information, Casio has taken a different route by adding a tiny built-in display that shows the time while also delivering health tracking and smart features.
A smart ring with a display and health tracking
Casio Ring Watch (CRW-H001M-8)
The Casio CRW-H001M-8 stands out with a compact digital display integrated into its ring-shaped design, making it one of the few smart rings that can tell the time without requiring a phone. The ring measures 25.3 x 19.5 x 6mm, weighs 19 grams, and is made from ceramic and stainless steel with mineral glass protection. It is water-resistant for everyday use and is designed for users with an inner ring diameter of approximately 20.1mm.
Casio Ring Watch (CRW-H001M-8)
Beyond its watch functionality, the wearable packs several health and fitness features. It can monitor heart rate, blood oxygen levels, body temperature, sleep, steps, calories burned, and workout activities. The companion app also provides training logs, workout analysis, health reports, and menstrual cycle tracking. Smart functions include vibration alerts for incoming calls, notifications, silent alarms, health alerts, and custom reminders.
Casio Ring Watch
The Ring Watch also offers world time, a stopwatch, alarm, automatic calendar, LED backlight, and both 12-hour and 24-hour time formats. Casio says the smartwatch module delivers 4 to 6 days of battery life on a full charge, extends to around 25 days in standby mode, while the watch display battery is rated to last about two years.
Price and availability
The Casio CRW-H001M-8 Ring Watch is priced at 1,990 CNY (around $295) in China. The company notes that the product is currently sold only in China, and after-sales support is also limited to the country. Casio also clarifies that its health monitoring features are designed for general fitness and wellness purposes and are not intended to replace medical devices.
TLDR; use a VPN, don’t click on update messages whilst on private wifi.
Microsoft has published a detailed analysis of an active campaign called CaptiveCrunch, in which the Russian threat group Storm-2945 — assessed to be part of Midnight Blizzard (APT29/Cozy Bear), Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) — has been hijacking hotel Wi-Fi gateways to deliver malware to travelers. The operation has been running since at least early May 2026 and has been observed across hospitality networks in multiple countries.
The attack works by taking administrative control of the captive portal gateway that hotels use to manage guest internet access. Because this gateway also acts as the DNS resolver for connected devices, the attackers can forge DNS responses and redirect any web request — for example, a routine browser connectivity check — to a fake “browser update” page. Victims who download and run the supposed update instead install CornFlake, a Go-based remote access trojan that disguises itself as svchost32.exe under the display name “Cloud Sync Service.” CornFlake can take idle-triggered screenshots, log keystrokes, steal browser cookies and saved passwords (including those protected by Chrome App-Bound Encryption), record clipboard contents, scan removable drives, and open a remote shell — all while a persistence watchdog re-installs itself if defenders try to remove it. A second implant, ChocoShell, targets Microsoft 365 and Azure Active Directory tokens stored in the system’s token broker cache, enabling session replay without needing a browser cookie. Since July 16, some CaptiveCrunch landing pages have also used Microsoft’s device code authentication flow to trick victims into granting MFA-bypassed access to attacker-controlled cloud sessions.
How to check if you’re affected
Affected devices are any laptop or mobile device used to connect to hotel or venue Wi-Fi since May 2026, particularly if the device received a browser or operating system update prompt from the captive portal login page. Steps to take:
If you accepted a software update, certificate installation, or troubleshooting tool offered through a hotel Wi-Fi sign-in page, scan the device with an updated endpoint security tool and look for svchost32.exe in %APPDATA%svchost32 (Windows) or unexpected scheduled tasks under that name.
Going forward: use an always-on VPN that routes DNS queries through corporate resolvers before the venue’s gateway can answer them. Never install software, browser updates, or security certificates through a captive portal.
If your organization uses Microsoft Conditional Access, disable the device code authentication flow where it is not operationally required — this blocks a key CaptiveCrunch credential-theft path.
