Right to Repair Europe examined 2,334 smartphone model records in the EU's Product Registry for Energy Labelling and found that only about 18 percent link to a working page with spare-parts prices or repair instructions, a year after the rules took effect. Roughly half the entries leave the required URL blank, and 19 percent point to unrelated pages, while some manufacturers still award themselves top repairability grades despite the missing information.
Reports say Apple is developing a privacy-focused home security and monitoring device that uses AI rather than video footage, tied to a new subscription service. Separately, executives including Eddy Cue are reportedly exploring ways to raise App Store margins and extract more recurring revenue from developers.
CloudSEK researchers infiltrated the admin panel of a phishing-as-a-service tool called BigBear 2.0 and found it had harvested over 5,000 Microsoft 365 credentials from 258 organizations. The kit uses an Evilginx2-based adversary-in-the-middle proxy to intercept usernames, passwords, and session cookies even after victims complete multi-factor authentication, letting attackers replay stolen sessions to hijack accounts.
Several Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 buyers say the corners of the phone's inner folding screen flex noticeably more than the rest of the panel when pressed, suggesting the corners lack proper structural support. Android Authority tested a loan unit and confirmed some give in one corner, though less severe than clips circulating online, and noted a teardown showing pads under the corners that appear to be magnets rather than adhesive. Samsung has not yet confirmed whether this is a defect or a normal design trait.
The Economist reports that despite fears of AI-driven job destruction, US employment data shows no broad downturn: unemployment sits at 4.1% and young workers' job prospects remain strong. While companies like Microsoft, Meta, Block and Intuit have cut roles tied to automation—averaging about 16,000 AI-related layoffs monthly—the publication estimates AI has simultaneously generated roughly 1 million new jobs through data-center construction, startup hiring and new corporate AI roles, dwarfing the roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to the technology since mid-2023.
Stella Parton took to Instagram to condemn a wave of AI-generated content and misinformation circulating online following her sister Dolly Parton's death on 25 August at age 80. While thanking fans for genuine expressions of support, she said the volume of fabricated posts had been difficult for her family to cope with during their grief.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and GTA III are once again playable directly in a web browser, this time hosted on a site called Quenq, after an earlier browser port on DOS Zone was pulled following a DMCA claim from Take-Two. The new version still carries DOS Zone branding in its pause menu, supports keyboard, controller and touchscreen input, and includes a save/mod manager plus adjustable frame rate, running smoothly past 100 FPS on desktop and working instantly on mobile devices like the OnePlus 12.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument team has published an updated version of its Legacy Imaging Surveys, offering free public access to the largest three-dimensional map of the cosmos ever assembled. The dataset spans 5.6 trillion pixels and roughly 75 percent of the sky, cataloging about 4 billion stars, galaxies, black holes and asteroids captured in visible and near-infrared light.
A developer found that CodePen's updated editor sends everything typed into its code fields to codepen.dev within one to two seconds, even without saving. Using a unique test marker in an HTML file, they confirmed CodePen triggered a build with save disabled and the marker still appeared verbatim in the generated preview page served from a codepen.dev subdomain.
Samsung has started rolling out the One UI 9 Watch beta, based on Wear OS 7, to the 2023 Galaxy Watch 6 and Watch 6 Classic models in South Korea. The update follows earlier beta releases for the Galaxy Watch 8, Watch 7, and Watch Ultra, though a full changelog has not yet been published.
A June fire at the unfinished Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York, left local firefighters battling smoke from unidentified chemicals with no working alarms, no suppression system, and three dry hydrants. TeraWulf, which owns and operates the site under a complex arrangement involving Fluidstack, Google, and Anthropic, said the required safety documents were destroyed in the blaze. Months later, the fire chief said promised fixes like functioning hydrants still had not been completed.
Unico has unveiled the Traveller ULW10, a 10-inch 4:3 CRT-style monitor built for retro gaming consoles, featuring a hidden rear compartment to stash hardware out of sight. The display supports RGB SCART, VGA, and HDMI inputs but notably omits composite video due to internal space constraints, and it can digitally emulate CRT and pixel-art visual effects despite not being a true CRT. It will launch via Kickstarter in three colorways, with pricing still unannounced.
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