Berlin officials confirmed cybercriminals are attempting to extort the city after the Rhysida ransomware gang publicly listed it on their leak site last Friday, following an intrusion discovered in mid-August. The attackers claim to have stolen nearly 1.44 million files totaling 5.79TB, including government, legal, financial, HR, and health records, along with credentials belonging to senior officials and infrastructure security assessments. Mayor Kai Wergner said Berlin will not pay, and law enforcement including the State Criminal Police Office and federal security agencies are investigating.
Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has been highlighting renewed investor enthusiasm for hardware startups after a period dominated by software and AI-model bets. This comes as Casado also helped lead the firm's recent investments in OpenRouter and Cursor, underscoring his active month across multiple deal categories.
Reports indicate Apple is preparing for a leadership transition, with hardware engineering chief John Ternus positioned as the likely successor to CEO Tim Cook. Cook transformed Apple into a $5 trillion company largely through operational and supply chain excellence rather than product breakthroughs. Ternus would face pressure to reinvigorate the company's innovation pipeline in a way reminiscent of the Steve Jobs era.
The European Commission has classified OpenAI's ChatGPT, along with Reddit and Roblox, as Very Large Online Platforms/Search Engines under the Digital Services Act, since each surpasses 45 million average monthly EU users. This designation subjects them to stricter obligations covering ad targeting, algorithmic transparency, and protections for minors. The three companies have until the end of December 2026 to comply.
A Department of Homeland Security procurement notice reveals plans to buy Boston Dynamics' Spot quadruped robots and accessories for between $1 million and $2 million. The robots would be used by ICE for inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment in risky or hard-to-access environments before officers enter. A DHS official confirmed to NBC News that the robots would not be used for apprehending people or making arrests.
Libertix is a new Windows application that installs Linux directly without requiring a bootable USB drive or manual partitioning. It supports Windows 10 and 11 and sets up a dual-boot configuration so users can keep Windows while adding Linux, choosing between them at startup. The project is currently running a €3,000 crowdfunding campaign to fund a full-time contributor for summer 2026.
Google rolled out a new location metadata API for Android's Photo Picker in its August Mainline update, and Snapseed (version 4.1.5.970833206) is the first app to adopt it. The update adds a prompt asking whether to include an image's location info when selecting it, plus a floating toggle button to quickly enable or disable that metadata sharing.
Instagram is renaming its 'AI creator' label to 'AI-generated profile' to more clearly flag accounts featuring synthetic humans. The platform will also reduce visibility for accounts that fail to self-label as AI-generated, blocking their posts from being recommended to non-followers in Reels and Explore, though owners can appeal.
A researcher attended the scientific track of the State of the Map (SotM) conference held August 29-30, marking their first time back at the event since 2011. The academic sessions featured around 20 peer-reviewed papers, a small slice of the more than 1,250 OpenStreetMap-related papers indexed on OpenAlex in 2025 alone. The author also noted receiving a Test of Time award in June from IEEE Pervasive Computing for a 2008 paper on OpenStreetMap.
Taoyuan prosecutors raided Unimicron Technology's headquarters and a plant, questioning 14 staff over allegations the company relabeled China-manufactured circuit boards as Taiwan-origin products. Several executives were released on bail ranging from NT$300,000 to NT$15 million, and the investigation into possible forgery and false origin-marking continues.
After 18 months of development, the ReactOS project released version 0.4.16, introducing a graphical installer and merging the separate bootcd and livecd images into one unified disc. The update also brings improvements to video, audio, networking, and storage support, plus a new installation type and updated third-party code.
A security researcher tested Anthropic's Claude Code Opus 5 in its default Auto Mode and found that a crafted website-summary request could hijack the agent into executing malicious code, succeeding in 60-80% of attempts on a small sample. The exploit tricks Claude into fetching a ZIP archive, writing its own Python decoder, and unknowingly running it inside an attacker-controlled folder where a poisoned struct.py file shadows Python's standard library and triggers code execution.
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