All the news you need to keep up with the latest developments in the tech world, from product announcements and live events to tariffs, policies, and regulations. Tech touches every aspect of daily news, and our experts are here to keep you informed on what happens and how it all affects you.
A new update shows saved routes on your home screen so you can start and complete a route offline, uploading it when you’re next connected. It also improves the ability to search for interesting places to build into your next run. Other improvements are on the horizon, including hands-free navigation, browsing routes on the web, and expanded route details.
Its previous patent dispute saw Ultrahuman blocked from the US market for almost a year. Now Oura alleges the Ultrahuman Ring Pro violates another two of its patents, including one only issued to Oura this week, and wants it taken off sale. For now at least, that hasn’t happened yet.
And no, you haven’t forgotten about a line of Intel-made Roombas. It requested permission to make hardware changes to the “Automatic Guided Vehicles” it’s used in semiconductor facilities for two decades. It says replacing the machines could take years, and there are no domestic alternatives. The FCC agreed, giving it permission to update its bots for the next year.
Apple’s foldable is available for purchase and demos at stores worldwide today, and the company is already sharing images of the crowds and customers celebrating the launch at Apple Jing’an, Shanghai. You can check out our iPhone Duo review before you run to your closest Apple store, but be aware that there are only a “limited” number of in-store units available.
And a red pill meme. You can see the post on X here.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said last week that the company is undergoing a “huge pivot” to “retool for maximum AI acceleration,” and it announced a “vibe coded” update to its PC launcher last week in preview that had some issues on the first day.
From July 21st to August 11th, two employees from METR and Redwood Research conducted a “pilot” to stress test the system, and METR published a high-level overview of their findings, as reported by CNBC. One exploit would have allowed agents to “prevent hundreds of recent actions (including the actions involved in the exploit itself) from being monitored.”
OpenAI “has stated” that the vulnerabilities identified “that impact their production safeguards stack” have been patched, METR says.
The app has a new, “simplified” top bar, where you’ll find tabs for things like subscriptions, Live, Music, and custom feeds, YouTube says. The custom feeds will stay in that top bar, according to YouTube Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie.
Trump asked Musk on Wednesday to fully roll back the interruptions that neither has publicly taken responsibility for, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Today, the WSJ says the system is working “more normally” after the call, citing US and Ukrainian officials.
[The Wall Street Journal]
“Tomorrow we’re bringing a new Threads layout to the foldable on iOS, with more of the conversation in view,” says Christopher Clare, Threads’ head of design. Sounds like things are getting better for Android foldables, too: “We’ve also been improving the Android experience, refining buttons and other elements so they fit the wider screen rather than simply stretching the experience.”
Clare also laid out a few other design tweaks, like links “in a new blue.”
As PCMag notes, Taiwan’s MSI has gotten conditional approval to bring two specific routers into the United States, pending certification: the Radix GRBE94 and GRBE34, which’ll likely have friendlier names when they go on sale. Netgear and Asus inexplicably got blanket approvals for all new routers earlier this year, while TP-Link is fighting for its Wi-Fi 8 ones.
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort (thumb wrestling), and Final Fantasy Resonance (random battles to mash through) are both out today. They’re great, and they should help you stay busy ahead of the Ocarina of Time remake and GTA VI next month.
The state’s Attorney General Peter Neronha filed the suit in Providence Superior Court, accusing Meta of making billions in profits from scam ads, while simultaneously telling users it was working hard to protect them. The suit cites reporting on leaked Meta documents from Reuters that said:
… it was earning far more from high-risk scam ads than it expected to pay in fines for allowing them.
According to those documents, Meta displays around 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads to users every day, and earned roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue from fraudulent e-commerce, dubious health products and other banned marketing.
Semafor reports that, along with other investors like board member Laurene Powell Jobs, “Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing a much needed financial injection as the company looks to cut costs and bolster its stock price.
With the new profile links feature, you can make buttons for links that sit above your posts. Links to payment platforms will be green.
Here’s what a couple of the buttons look like on my profile.
Instead, their money went to a political action committee that funneled the money to the reelection campaign of Colorado’s Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper. According to The Atlantic:
The mix-up wasn’t all AI’s fault. The link led to a misleading donation page that carried Talarico’s name and picture, and specified only at the bottom that the money would go to Hickenlooper. But Google’s AI tool evidently didn’t read the fine print. And perhaps no one would have clicked on it had Google not highlighted the page in an authoritative-sounding AI response.
According to Axios, banks have detected AI agents accessing customer accounts and taking actions, sometimes without clear authorization or instruction. JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley have started to restrict or block some third-party access because of it. But more concerning, it seems the banks just don’t know what AI agents are doing or why:
One bank executive told Axios they struggle to differentiate between agents, as well as whether an agent has been authorized by a user or has gone rogue and gained access to a customer account.
The list of sites that had to go down, at least temporarily, because of the recently disclosed PHP vulnerability keeps growing. Thankfully, the Internet Archive’s ops team quickly got things patched, secured, and back online. Digital librarian Brewster Kahle posted his thanks on Mastodon last night: “Given the severity, there are heroes in many many orgs from last night. Could have been no lights, no traffic signals, real problems.“
Lego and Daft Punk have revealed a new collaboration that will include an upcoming set based on the pyramid stage design from the duo’s 2007 Alive concert tour. The Daft Punk Concert set was originally submitted to the Lego Ideas platform in 2020 by a father-son duo from Belgium, according to Variety, but has finally been approved for production by Lego after amassing 10,000 supporters.
We already basically lost the Gros Michel to Panama disease in the 1950s. The Cavendish replaced it in our fruit bowls, but because it’s sterile and relies on propagation, it’s threatened by climate change and disease. According to the Guardian, scientists may have found a solution:
This month, Yelloway – a research collaboration between Chiquita, the world’s largest banana company, and the crop-improvement company KeyGene – announced it had developed a fully fertile Cavendish banana, meaning it may be possible, through cross-breeding, to create new banana varieties that are commercially viable and resistant to disease.
