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Tech News
Marketing firm Vital Design saw organic blog traffic drop 60% as AI search tools rose, yet its sales-ready leads held steady or grew. The company credits a strategy called answer engine optimization (AEO), which aims to get AI chatbots to recommend a business during a customer's research phase before they ever visit a website.
Outdoor gear maker Arc'teryx is beginning a company-wide redesign effort aimed at making every product it manufactures fully recyclable, starting with one of its most technically complex hard shell jackets. The initiative is being framed as a multiyear circularity program rather than a single product launch.
Google has released three new Gemini Audio models: 3.5 Transcribe, 3.5 Live, and 3.5 Live Experimental. Transcribe automatically strips out filler words like 'um' and 'uh', formats text, adapts to custom vocabulary and jargon, and can identify up to three speakers with word-level timestamps. The Live models improve handling of interruptions, multilingual recognition, and real-time reasoning narration for voice chat.
NASA astronaut Christina Koch revealed she spent her first week back from the 10-day Artemis II lunar mission journaling about the experience while deliberately avoiding any mission photos. She wanted to capture her memories as they actually felt before the widely shared images could reshape them. Koch, along with commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and specialist Jeremy Hansen, completed the farthest human trip around the moon in over 50 years in early April.
Google's Pixel 11 Pro retains the vivid, bright screen praised in its predecessor, but review testing found it throttles and shows overheating and battery-drain warnings when graphics settings are pushed above minimum levels. Google also dropped the 128GB storage tier across the lineup, meaning the cheapest configuration now starts at $1,099 for 256GB, with only 12GB of RAM at that entry level. Google attributed the higher storage and pricing to an AI-driven RAM shortage raising component costs industrywide.
Amazon's Ring is rolling out a new encryption scheme called Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE) starting this September. Under the system, video is protected by rotating encryption keys, and Ring can only briefly access its stored copy of the key to power AI features like face detection or video summaries before permanently deleting that copy, cutting off further access to the footage.
PeopleFinders.com, the online data broker, has launched a new platform called Stud or Dud that lets users run background checks on potential romantic partners using just a name or phone number. The tool compiles public records—including court documents, bankruptcy filings, tax liens, and social media activity—into a single report covering finances, assets, employment, and criminal history, complete with an AI-generated summary and flagged 'red' or 'green' indicators.
A pay-what-you-can dining initiative that started small in Mexico City has grown this year to include more than 100 restaurants across Mexico, the United States, and other countries. On August 26, 2026, participating eateries let diners choose their own price for meals based on what they can afford.
Developer Niklas Gruhn coined the term 'meat proxy' to describe coworkers who forward unedited chatbot responses instead of engaging with the content themselves. He wrote that receiving these raw AI outputs adds no value, since colleagues could simply query the AI directly. The phrase follows other recent slang like 'clanker' that reflects growing frustration with AI's creeping presence in daily work and communication.
A blogger describes a quirk of using GHCi (and ghcid) for live code reloading: GHCi can only track one set of source files at a time, so a properly separated project with distinct executable, library and test components can't have all parts reloaded simultaneously. To work around this while editing both tests and program code, the author merges everything into a single component, a compromise unsuitable for serious projects but workable for small experiments.
Meta has agreed to a proposed settlement worth up to roughly $18 billion with 52 state attorneys general over claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to hook young users and mislead the public about the risks. The deal, still awaiting court approval, stems from a 2023 lawsuit accusing Meta of fostering compulsive teen use and unlawfully collecting data from children under 13 in violation of COPPA and California consumer protection laws.
Dick's Sporting Goods is closing more Foot Locker stores in 2026 as part of an ongoing effort to shrink that chain's retail footprint. The company's stock dropped sharply after it issued a revised financial outlook, signaling that its turnaround plan for Foot Locker is behind expectations.