15 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Archives for October 2026

Andrew Liszewski
Andrew Liszewski
Hallmark’s Halo special edition Xbox ornament glows green.

In 2024, Hallmark added a tiny version of the original Xbox to its holiday ornament collection and then followed up last year with a miniature Xbox 360. For 2026 it’s returning to Microsoft’s first console, but the translucent green Halo special edition version. It will be available at the end of the month for $27.99 and includes a glowing greed LED and sound effects.

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A miniature green Xbox console Hallmark ornament hanging from a tree branch.
Image: Hallmark
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
How Claude Fable 5.1 can encode — and decode —messages in images.

Research done as part of the Singapore AI Safety Fellowship shows how Anthropic’s AI model can embed hidden messages into images using Morse code, object rotations, colors, and heights. The researchers also found that separate sessions of Fable 5.1 could decipher about 78 percent of the hidden messages based on a screenshot.

1/3Image: Nikita Kezin, Bryan Chan, James Chua via LessWrong
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Is this the first cracked iPhone Duo screen?

According to a user on Reddit, “Had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer than 20 times. I was showing it to a friend, and as I opened it, I felt something around the internal hinge, underneath the screen. As I continued opening it, I heard an audible crack, and the screen broke right along the hinge.”

They also said the Apple Store already replaced it.

Andrew Liszewski
Andrew Liszewski
Amazon adds handwritten ebook notes to the Kindle Android app.

After adding the option to annotate Kindle ebooks with handwritten notes on its new Alexa Tablets, Amazon has brought the same functionality to the Kindle Android app, as some users in the Kindle subreddit have discovered. It currently appears limited to Android tablets and phones that support a stylus, and it hasn’t come to the iPadOS version of the app yet.

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A screenshot of the Kindle Android app showing handwritten notes on an ebook.
Image: Reddit
Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Quest Diagnostics confirms patient records were stolen in a data breach.

The scope of the attack and exactly what data was compromised isn’t clear, only that some “personal information and patient records were affected.” Quest says its investigation is ongoing and it will alert impacted customers “as required by applicable law.” Oddly, as TechCrunch notes, the FAQ about the breach contains “noindex” code, making it difficult for customers to find.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Shein reportedly agreed to pay $100 million to settle an FTC investigation.

According to Reuters’ sources, the FTC was investigating Shein over “delivery delays and other customer complaints,” adding that the settlement would be “equivalent to 44% of Shein’s second-quarter profit.” The European Union also opened an investigation into Shein earlier this year over concerns about “addictive design” features and illegal product listings.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
One man basically saved the internet from the PHPocalypse.

Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic interviewed Ondřej Surý, the man almost single-handedly responsible for packaging up the patch for this week’s vulnerabilities. It’s a fascinating conversation, from Surý‘s odd nonchalance about saving the web to his concern that for-profit companies are exploiting open-source. But he hopes that this AI-assisted discovery will lead to a change:

… Everything’s moving fast now, and it’s taking a toll on the people who are defending the stuff. At the same time, maybe this is the turning point where we actually start caring about this … I might be wrong, but I’m an optimist that people will finally realize that we can’t go like this forever. This has been a disaster waiting to happen for a really, really long time.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenAI safety researchers say they were fired over disappearing Signal messages.

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang tell The Wall Street Journal that OpenAI terminated them after finding disappearing messages on Signal in a chat with Ryan Greenblatt, the former chief scientist at AI safety evaluator Redwood Research. OpenAI reportedly accused Greenblatt of leaking details about its Astra AI model to The Information, which Greenblatt has denied.

OpenAI tells the WSJ that the researchers were fired for violating “clear policies for handling sensitive information,” and “not for raising safety concerns or speaking out.”