14 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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News Archive

Archives for October 2026

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Meta is acquiring an AI analytics company.

Axios has the story. The company, Sundial, was founded by two former Meta employees, and they and others from Sundial will join Meta. One of the co-founders, Chandra Narayanan, will lead Meta’s “data analytics tooling and agents work,” according to Alex Shultz, Meta’s chief data officer.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Steam’s Personal Calendar feature is exiting beta.

About a year after Valve introduced the feature, which recommends new and upcoming games you might be interested in and even shows some on an actual calendar, it’s now considered a “full feature” of the Steam Store, Valve says.

My personal calendar page has me pretty dead to rights; among other games, it recommends Final Fantasy Resonance, Star Wars: Galactic Racer, both of which I reviewed and really liked, and some indie games I already had my eye on.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Netflix reportedly offered Microsoft $500 million to license Xbox games for adaptations.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and team countered by asking for $800 million, and Netflix has pulled its offer, Puck reports in an article discussing the new leadership at Netflix.

Xbox launched an “XP” division this month that will work on adaptations of its games, and Xbox is already working with Netflix on a Diablo animated series.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Sen. Marsha Blackburn isn’t happy about Meta’s revised business terms, either.

Blackburn (R-TN) said the updated terms “indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook ​and Instagram business accounts,” according to Reuters.

Following publisher pushback, Meta delayed the enforcement of these new policies until November 20th.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Texas becomes the latest state to sue OpenAI.

Similar to the lawsuits filed by Arizona, West Virginia, Iowa, and several others, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accuses OpenAI of misleading users about the safety of ChatGPT, allegedly exposing children and other users to a “litany of harms” that’s “driven by the company’s insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass
large fortunes.”

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Windows will soon let you perform an internet speed test without opening your browser.

A Windows 11 Insider Preview build rolling out to the Beta and Experimental channels will allow you to right-click the network icon in your system tray and hit “Perform speed test” to run it right in your Quick Settings menu. The feature previously opened a speed test in your browser.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Gotta scroll fast.

A new accelerated scrolling feature coming to Windows PCs with touchpads will allow you to scroll through long documents and webpages faster, Windows design head Marcus Ash announced on X. Microsoft is also adding the ability to continuously scroll through a page by swiping the edge of your touchpad, along with support for single-finger scrolling.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Amazon is planning more day-and-date Luna game releases for Prime subscribers.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer was available to stream on Luna at no extra cost to Prime subscribers the same day it launched on other platforms, and in a post celebrating the one-year anniversary of Luna’s relaunch, Amazon says it plans to bring more “major” day-and-date releases to Prime members.

Luna’s user base has also grown “fivefold” since the relaunch, Amazon’s gaming GM, Jeff Gattis, says in the post. I spoke to Gattis earlier this year about Amazon’s plan for games.

One Year of Amazon Luna

[Amazon Game Studios]

Andrew Liszewski
Andrew Liszewski
Even this quadruped robot can solve a Rubik’s Cube faster than I can.

Researchers from ETH Zürich’s Robotic Systems Lab used reinforcement learning through simulations and “teacher-student distillation” to teach a quadruped robot how to independently solve an oversized Rubik’s Cube. The feat is even more impressive given the bot has to use its stubby legs and feet to reorient the cube and rotate its sides.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Proton is hosting a map of more than 300,000 Flock cams.

The map comes from security researcher Joshua Michael, who is facing a trademark complaint from Flock after he published an interactive map of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) using information from a data leak. Proton is now hosting the map, but notes that it’s a snapshot from December 2025, so “devices installed or removed since then won’t be reflected.”