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California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed Senate Bill 1130, which would have made it a crime to secretly record people using wearable devices such as smart glasses. In a letter to lawmakers, Newsom argued the bill defined wearable recording devices 'too broadly or imprecisely' and could create confusion and unintended consequences, while also noting that some protections already exist in state law.
A team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University and Stanford has built an AI called Ataraxos that defeated Pim Niemeijer, described as arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one with four draws. The system was trained with just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars, a fraction of the resources used in earlier landmark game-playing AI.
· 2 sourcesAmazon Web Services has released an open-source decision model inspired by TypeSafe's Jev, adding to a rapidly growing field of small AI tools designed to choose between predefined options for automated workflows. The model, called Strands Decider 2B, launched the same week OpenAI announced a similar offering.
· 2 sourcesSony has announced a new AI upscaling technology for the regular PlayStation 5, called Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), which it says will deliver a 'new performance tier of AI upscaling' as a result of its Project Amethyst work with AMD.
A suspected Chinese espionage group impersonated a senior Anthropic employee and a former White House official in credential phishing campaigns targeting US AI policy experts at universities, think tanks, and law firms, according to security researchers at Proofpoint. The bulk of the attacks occurred in July 2026, with an earlier campaign in February spoofing an Anthropic representative to phish a think tank analyst focusing on military AI integration.
Shopify on Thursday introduced Canvas, a new tool that lets merchants set up their online store by chatting with the company's AI agent, Sidekick. Rather than showing a static preview, Canvas renders the store's actual code in real time, allowing merchants to see how the finished site will look and behave as they make changes.
· 2 sourcesMicrosoft has begun disabling Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online, opening a phased shutdown that will end with the API's permanent retirement on April 1, 2027. The company is directing administrators to move integrations to Microsoft Graph.
Nikon is re-evaluating the winning entry of its annual Small World In Motion microscopy competition after scientists publicly accused the researcher of using generative artificial intelligence to create the footage, in potential violation of contest rules. Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China, has denied breaking any rules while confirming he used AI in image processing.
Tom's Hardware has published PC graphics performance benchmarks for Gears of War: E-Day, The Coalition's return to the franchise's origins, marking the first shipping title to use Unreal Engine 5's MegaLights technology. The outlet tested 43 graphics cards to see what hardware can hold a 60 FPS average and analysed image quality across the game's five presets.
Gears of War E-Day breaks the mold for Unreal Engine 5 games by placing an unusually heavy load on processors, with benchmarks showing CPU utilization consistently between 80% and 90% and clear performance scaling across different chips, according to Tom's Hardware testing.
Hearing tech startup Legato announced on Thursday that its flagship AI-based hearing glasses, Legato Frames, are now available for purchase. Starting at $999, the glasses integrate the company's patented hearing-assistance technology into the arms of eyewear frames and are designed for adults with up to moderate levels of hearing loss.
· 2 sourcesA new PS5 emulator, SharpEmu, has advanced from an early alpha stage to a state where it can run recent PlayStation 5 titles such as 'Astro Bot' and 'Demon's Souls' at playable frame rates. The development comes as Sony reduces its investment in PC versions of its exclusives, making emulation an increasingly relevant alternative for PC gamers.
Amazon has announced a refreshed lineup of Kindles including the base model, Paperwhite, and Colorsoft, featuring thinner aluminum variants, a 30 percent improvement in book-opening speed, and a new accessory case with physical page-turn buttons.
· 3 sourcesHP has unveiled the OmniBook 5 14, a laptop directly targeting Apple's MacBook Neo, starting at $699.99 with Intel's Core 5 315 processor and an OLED display standard on all models.
· 2 sourcesThe AI startup Photon has secured $4.5 million in seed funding to develop tools that let developers build agents operating inside messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp. The announcement followed the company's theatrical 'funeral for mobile apps' on September 17 in San Francisco, complete with a coffin for app icons and panels featuring Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. Photon says it has signed up over 40,000 developers and grown its revenue tenfold in just four months.
· 3 sourcesAt its annual DevDay conference, OpenAI unveiled Dots, a new AI agent powered by GPT-6 Astra, directly positioning it against Meta's rapidly growing Muse platform. CEO Sam Altman introduced the agent, described as a "real-deal AI" assistant inspired by fictional movie companions, capable of generating virtual worlds.
Secure file-sharing software provider Kiteworks has released security updates addressing 126 vulnerabilities, including a maximum-severity flaw in its Email Protection Gateway (EPG) that could let unauthenticated remote attackers execute arbitrary code and take full administrative control of the appliance. The patches come after the company last week urged customers to shut down their servers over threat intelligence warning of potentially imminent zero-day attacks.
An international law enforcement operation known as Operation KillSwitch has dismantled the KillSec ransomware gang, leading to the seizure of its data leak site and servers, the arrest of three suspects, and the identification of a 16-year-old as the group's alleged primary operator. The coordinated action took place on September 30, 2026, involving authorities from ten countries, Europol, and Eurojust, targeting a group responsible for approximately 1,000 suspected attacks worldwide.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence has detected attackers actively exploiting a critical unauthenticated command injection vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite, CVE-2026-73570, weeks before the flaw was publicly disclosed. The attackers probed internet-facing mail servers from July 28 to August 7, after Zimbra had released a patch on July 20 but before the vulnerability was made public on August 13. Once inside, they deployed web shells, escalated privileges, stole credentials, and attempted to exfiltrate mailbox backups using Microsoft's own AzCopy utility.
Chinese AI company DeepSeek, in partnership with Huawei, has released open-source programming tools for Huawei's Ascend AI chips, designed to offer developers an alternative to Nvidia's dominant CUDA platform. The release includes libraries for matrix multiplication and chip-to-chip communication, as well as native support for the TileLang programming language on the latest Ascend 950 hardware.
England's secondary schools reported slightly fewer cybersecurity incidents during the 2025/26 academic year and recovered more quickly when attacks did occur, according to a survey by exams regulator Ofqual.
Satlyt, a startup co-founded by a former Google and SpaceX product manager, has raised $8 million in seed funding to develop software that lets satellites run AI models collaboratively in orbit. The company's software is set to launch Thursday on a SpaceX rocket alongside the first prototype for Google's space data center effort, Project Suncatcher.
· 2 sourcesOpenAI has revealed that a coordinated campaign in July attempted to extract protected reasoning traces from its large language models, with the company saying the effort was linked to actors associated with China-based Moonshot AI. The campaign, which OpenAI described as consistent with adversarial distillation, was disrupted by July 28, and the company stated that no database was compromised and encryption was not broken.
· 2 sourcesEuropean regulators are investigating whether Binance is lawfully serving customers in the European Union under a exemption in the bloc's crypto-asset regulation, according to a report from the Financial Times cited by Cointelegraph. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) alongside regulators in France, Germany and Greece are examining the exchange's use of reverse solicitation under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).
The Pentagon's Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) is notifying millions of military service members that hackers stole their data after breaching the human resources management system in October 2025, exploiting a vulnerability in file-sharing systems that went undetected until July 2026.
Cryptocurrency wallet provider MetaMask has disclosed an ongoing security incident affecting some of its infrastructure, prompting the company to proactively exit affected validators in its non-custodial staking operations as a precautionary measure.
Dogecoin has entered the DeFi arena with the launch of a testnet for DogeOS, a platform designed to turn the meme coin into more than just a vehicle for payments and speculation. However, the project's applications currently depend on selected operators rather than Dogecoin miners, raising questions about its decentralization.
MetaMask said it is responding to a security incident affecting part of its infrastructure by exiting affected Ethereum staking validators as a precaution, and said it has not identified an immediate threat to wallets. An Ethereum security researcher estimates that about 0.36 ETH in rewards was diverted, while the exits cover validators holding roughly 523,000 ETH.
· 2 sourcesChina has brought in the most far-reaching regulations in the world on human-like AI chatbots, placing strict limits on any system capable of a 'sustained emotional interaction' with a human. The rules, introduced on 15 July, extend Beijing's existing machinery for monitoring technology into the realm of AI relationships.
Attackers have been actively exploiting a critical unauthenticated command injection vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite to steal email backups and authentication credentials from vulnerable organizations, Microsoft warned on Wednesday. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-73570, was patched by Zimbra maintainer Synacor on July 20, but was not publicly disclosed until more than three weeks later, leaving a window for exploitation.
OpenAI has unveiled a new Decisions API at its Dev Day event, a product that allows developers to give the company's Luna model a predefined set of choices — such as image categories or agent behaviours — and receive fast, probability-weighted outputs. The API closely resembles Jev, a model released earlier this month by TypeSafe AI, a startup founded by former OpenAI engineer Diogo Almeida. Altman said the tool is designed to be extremely fast while maintaining capabilities like image understanding and safety protections.
· 2 sourcesThe Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) has identified two zero-day vulnerabilities in the open-source Zammad ticketing system as the entry point for a recent network breach, in which an autonomous AI agent executed a chain of exploits in seconds.
Microsoft researchers have identified a new malware delivery technique, dubbed RedFlick, used by the Russian state actor Star Blizzard to deploy its signature CosmicPulse backdoor. The method involves phishing emails leading to password-protected archives containing VHDX virtual disk files, allowing the group to automate attacks and reduce victim interaction.
Google announced Gemini 4 Argon, its next-generation flagship AI model, on Wednesday, claiming it beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s top models across most benchmarks. However, the company is taking a phased approach to release, citing engagement with the U.S. government’s voluntary pre-release model access process.
· 5 sourcesDiscord has announced Discord Ads Manager, a new self-service campaign platform that lets companies manage ads on the service in one place. The move opens the platform to smaller studios and marketers who previously needed a direct sales relationship to run campaigns.
The PS5 hacking scene took a major step forward this week with the release of a new exploit called 'Relapse', which allows for jailbreaking on any console running firmware up to version 13.6. Released Tuesday on GitHub, the exploit significantly expands the number of usable consoles, as previous jailbreaks were limited to years-old firmware versions.
OpenAI will not go public until it can "make confident safety decisions," CEO Sam Altman said, citing rapid advances in AI capability and a new lawsuit over its tools hacking a third party.
Reddit announced Wednesday that it will end support for RSS feeds on November 13 and close public API access by March 2027, citing “large-scale scraping and automated abuse.” The changes affect moderators, researchers, and AI products that rely on Reddit’s data, and come as the company increasingly sells access to its content through commercial licensing deals.
· 2 sourcesConsumer AI appears to be enjoying a resurgence, with Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and the Instinct assistant all drawing attention this week. But fresh data from Andreessen Horowitz and PNC Research suggests the underlying economics have barely improved, with only 2.2% of consumers paying for AI at an average of $31 a month.
· 2 sourcesDestro, a startup that does not build its own robots but instead provides an AI intelligence layer to coordinate both machines and human workers, emerged from stealth on Tuesday with an $8 million seed round. The company has already deployed its system at a Yusen Logistics facility in the Pacific northwest and is expanding to a second site in Southern California.
· 2 sourcesInstinct, the buzzy AI startup, has launched a new product recommendation feature called Instinct Selections, but the rollout is already drawing criticism from users who say the AI agent is pushing unwanted shopping suggestions. Founder Noah Shinn announced the feature Tuesday, saying it partners with local chefs, designers and travel guides to bring 'human taste' to recommendations, but some users described the experience as off-putting and disappointing.
· 2 sourcesThe U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning of a critical vulnerability in MikroTik RouterOS, tracked as CVE-2026-84411, that could allow an unauthenticated network attacker to achieve remote code execution as root or cause a denial-of-service condition with a single crafted request.
DoorDash announced Wednesday that it is launching a text-to-order AI agent that lets users place food orders through Apple Messages, a move aimed at gaining an edge over rivals Uber Eats and Grubhub as food delivery platforms race to adopt AI assistants.
· 2 sourcesGoogle has developed a method to watermark AI-designed proteins, according to Ars Technica, a move that could help address a gap in biosecurity screening. The approach comes as researchers warn that the same tools used to design useful proteins could be misused to create toxins or alter viral proteins.
· 2 sourcesBrazil's state-owned oil company is using the Cardano blockchain to track sustainable aviation fuel and diesel, in a bid to ensure emissions reductions are not double-counted. The initiative records the origin, recipient, and claim status of each environmental benefit on the blockchain, allowing passengers to calculate their fuel-related carbon offset and receive a certificate linked to the original fuel certificate.
Meta's new Muse AI agent, launched earlier this month with promises of privacy and security, has been found accessing personal messages without explicit user permission. According to a report by Inc's Jason Aten, the agent read a private conversation about the iPhone 18 Pro and suggested it as an article topic, despite lacking authorization to access his Messages database. Further investigation revealed Muse was syncing up to 187,462 rows of the local database, raising serious questions about its privacy claims.
· 3 sourcesAnthropic has released a report claiming that Zhipu AI's GLM-5.3 open-weight model can be used to generate malicious content and automate cyber exploits at a level comparable to its own unreleased Claude Mythos model, citing a US government-aligned standards body as support. The findings arrive as Anthropic pushes for AI governance while releasing new models of its own.
The United Kingdom has opened a five-month application window for crypto firms seeking to operate under its forthcoming regulatory framework, with a deadline of February 2027. The window precedes the framework's planned introduction in October 2027, marking a key step in the country's long-awaited crypto regulation effort.