GoKawiil
Tech News
Proton is experiencing a partial outage that has disrupted access to most of its services, including Mail, VPN, Calendar, and Wallet. The company's website remains operational, but it has acknowledged the issue on its status page and says it is investigating the cause.
Florida's Department of Transportation announced it will stop using license plate reading cameras like Flock's on state highways, giving agencies 30 days to remove them, citing misuse and privacy concerns. This follows Texas's decision last week to halt state funding for Flock cameras after a Lufkin police officer was indicted on 100 felony counts for allegedly misusing the database to track people without authorization.
YouTube SEO agency Tasty Edits notes that many creators overlook native platform features designed to boost video performance, instead spending time comparing third-party tools. Among the most neglected are YouTube's built-in A/B testing for titles and thumbnails, and interactive elements like cards, quizzes and end screens that can be added during upload alongside tags and descriptions.
Perplexity has introduced Hybrid Compute, a new feature within its Perplexity Computer platform that divides a single task between a cloud-based frontier model, such as Opus 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol, and a smaller model running locally on a user's Mac. The system automatically flags sensitive files or data and routes them to the local model, while less sensitive parts of the task go to the cloud for stronger reasoning power. Users can review and adjust which files are kept local before the task runs, and choose from local options including Gemma E4B and two Qwen 3.6 variants.
Perplexity has launched a hybrid compute feature for its Computer agentic platform that splits AI tasks between cloud-based frontier models and smaller open-weight models running locally on Apple silicon Macs. Sensitive data is automatically routed to the on-device model via a locally-run 'Privacy Gate' classifier that detects personal information before anything reaches the cloud, without interrupting the task or losing context. The feature launches today for opted-in enterprise customers plus Pro and Max subscribers on Macs running macOS 15 or later.
GoKawiil's summer analysis of Hugging Face data shows public model repositories rose from 2.43M to 2.96M between January and August 2026, with datasets and Spaces also expanding sharply. Despite that growth, download activity remains concentrated in a tiny fraction of repositories, and Chinese labs including Moonshot, MiniMax, Xiaomi and Z.ai are releasing massive models, some exceeding a trillion parameters, without first publishing smaller versions.
Startup Newlight tested a retrofit hydrogen-injection system on a 650-foot Lomar Shipping bulk carrier during an 8,500-nautical-mile voyage from Singapore to Ghana. The system, which precisely times hydrogen injections alongside diesel combustion, reduced fuel consumption by 24% and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 28% during the month-long trip. Newlight says the retrofit can be installed in under two weeks without dry-docking a vessel.
NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel reported that after reviewing data from the Artemis II mission, the Orion capsule's heat shield showed only about nine sites of char loss, a dramatic improvement from the more than 100 sites, some over an inch deep, seen after Artemis I. NASA had altered Orion's reentry trajectory rather than redesign the heat shield following the 2022 issues, and the approach appears to have worked as the crew safely splashed down in the Pacific.
Sonos unveiled its Sonos 27 software platform alongside new hardware, introducing annual OS version numbers and a redesigned app interface. The update lets external AI assistants like ChatGPT control Sonos systems through a public MCP server, enabling voice or text commands to play music, move audio between rooms, and adjust volume without a dedicated app.
Sonos has released the Ace Ultra, a successor to its original Ace headphones, adding the ability to pull audio from any Sonos speaker or soundbar rather than just a limited set of compatible soundbars. The feature, powered by a new Headphone Engine 2 platform with redesigned Wi-Fi hardware, lets users move sound from TVs, turntables or streaming apps to the headphones with a single button press, though it remains an opt-in Early Access feature.
Sonos has introduced the Ace Ultra, a premium successor to its Ace noise-canceling headphones priced at $449. The new model features Sonos-designed 40mm drivers, upgraded adaptive noise cancellation, a 10-microphone array, and Headphone Engine 2, which enables direct one-button linking to a user's Sonos system. Preorders open now, with shipping starting September 29 in black, soft white, agave and sand colorways.
Apple updated its leadership page to reflect John Ternus's new role as CEO, adding an entirely new paragraph to his official bio. The addition emphasizes his work on product reliability, durability, and materials innovation, including recycled aluminum and 3D-printed titanium components, as well as improvements to product repairability and lifespan.