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Tech News
Shodan, a search engine that indexes internet-connected devices rather than web pages, has surpassed 3 million registered users worldwide. Its user base now includes 89% of Fortune 100 companies, five of the top six cloud providers, and more than 1,000 universities.
Cognitive scientist Anthony Chemero's book 'Intertwined Creatures' argues that much of the current discussion about whether AI can be conscious rests on flawed, outdated notions of human cognition itself. He contends that Western philosophy's traditional model of mind as a detached, disembodied thinker is wrong, and instead proposes that human cognition is embodied, dynamic, and fundamentally shaped by social and environmental interaction.
Robotic exoskeleton devices designed to assist walking, running and jumping are transitioning quickly from research prototypes into commercially available consumer products. Unlike bulky sci-fi mech suits, these newer devices are lightweight and increasingly aimed at everyday users, including hikers, rather than industrial or medical specialists alone.
Quantinuum has unveiled Helios, a trapped-ion quantum computer using 98 qubits, the largest such system built to date. The machine relies on a new four-way X junction hardware design paired with Helios runtime software, allowing it to move and process data across multiple paths simultaneously rather than in a single line, as earlier machines required.
A developer created Varkos, an AI-driven companion mod for Skyrim that can fight, loot, fetch items, and carry out multi-step commands in real time using local inference instead of cloud-based LLM calls. The project aims to fix the latency and weak world-interaction problems common in existing AI NPC dialogue systems, while giving Varkos a persistent personality that evolves with shared gameplay experiences.
Enterprise AI systems are largely built by connecting individual applications directly to source documents, generating separate chunks, embeddings and retrieval pipelines per use case. As companies scale up the number of AI agents and applications, teams end up duplicating work on the same documents and producing inconsistent, sometimes contradictory representations of the same business knowledge.
An engineer spent two weeks pointing an AI coding agent, Claude Opus 5, at the firmware and update tools of everyday USB peripherals—a microphone, a webcam, and a key light. The agent extracted a full command shell from the microphone, found a way to disable the webcam's recording LED while it still captures video, and discovered the key light accepts unauthenticated memory writes from any device on the same WiFi network.
A lawsuit accuses Twitch and its parent company Amazon of using streamers' broadcasted content to train artificial intelligence systems without proper consent or compensation. The suit claims this practice exploited creators' work for commercial AI development purposes they never agreed to.
VESA patterns refer to the standardized spacing, in millimeters, between the threaded mounting holes on the back of a TV, given as horizontal by vertical measurements. This spacing is unrelated to screen size or resolution, so buyers should check their exact TV model rather than assume a pattern based on display dimensions. Most wall mounts support several VESA patterns, so a bracket doesn't need to match one exact size as long as the TV's pattern is on its supported list.
OpenAI has rolled out a version of ChatGPT tailored for teenage users, prompting renewed scrutiny over how the company safeguards younger users from harmful content. Critics and safety advocates are questioning whether the age-specific controls are sufficient given ongoing concerns about AI chatbots' interactions with minors.
An opinion piece argues that a 17-year-old today should focus on building large language models from scratch rather than just using them, in order to understand their capabilities and limits. The author notes LLMs excel at tasks like writing essays but fail at physical, real-world tasks like cleaning a room, and suggests pursuing college and graduate study aimed at closing that gap. The piece frames this as a path toward developing new architectures beyond current LLMs for physical-world learning.
Android Auto mirrors a driver's phone onto a compatible car display for navigation, music, messaging, and apps, working over USB or wirelessly. Android Automotive OS, in contrast, runs natively on the vehicle's own hardware without requiring a connected phone at all.