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Tech News
Meta is expected to unveil a new pair of smart glasses at Connect 2026 that drop cameras entirely, relying instead on added microphones for voice interaction with its AI assistant. The frames are said to come in two styles and will be slimmer, resembling regular eyewear, according to reports ahead of the event.
The Vergecast's David Imel and Allison Johnson examined Apple's iPhone 18 Pro camera system, highlighting its new variable aperture main lens designed for better low-light and depth-of-field control. They concluded that the camera app's manual controls, revamped imaging pipeline, and improved ProRAW support are proving more practically useful day-to-day than the aperture hardware itself.
An Electronic Frontier Foundation investigation found numerous police officers logging nonsensical or joke reasons—like 'LMAO,' 'LOL,' or keyboard-mashed text—when justifying searches through Flock's nationwide license plate camera network. One Indiana officer wrote 'LMAO' before searching over 19,000 cameras across 1,500-plus cities, while an Oklahoma officer typed gibberish to access more than 83,000 cameras. When EFF followed up with departments about these entries, few offered meaningful accountability.
A reader survey conducted by Android Authority found that camera quality and clean software topped the list of priorities for people buying new phones, ahead of performance and reliability. Ecosystem lock-in and customization options, features brands frequently tout, ranked far lower among respondents' concerns.
Leaker Digital Chat Station shared a near-complete spec list for the OnePlus 16 after it cleared network access certification in China. The phone is tipped to pack a 9,000mAh battery with 100W wired and 50W wireless charging, a 200MP primary camera alongside 50MP ultrawide and telephoto lenses, and a 165-185Hz display. It's expected to run on a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip with up to 16GB of RAM.
Apple is hosting a three-day photography exhibition in New York City, running September 18-20, featuring work by photographers Alex Prager, Jack Davison, and Jimmy Chin shot entirely on the iPhone 18 Pro. Curated by former New York Times Magazine photo director Kathy Ryan, the show titled 'What Holds Us' spans subjects from mountain climbers in British Columbia to intimate portraits inside a London warehouse.
Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe signed an executive order requiring state agencies and state-funded police departments to limit how automated license plate readers, including Flock Safety systems, collect and store data. The order mandates deletion of most vehicle data within 30 days, bans selling or commercializing the data, restricts its use to criminal justice and lifesaving purposes, and forbids pairing the readers with facial recognition AI.
Photographer Austin Mann published his annual deep-dive into the iPhone 18 Pro camera, testing the new variable aperture, Pro manual controls, and Photographic Styles 3. He praises the camera's automatic aperture selection, showcases low-light shots enabled by the wider f/1.48 aperture, and details how to separate focus from exposure for the first time on iPhone.
A hacker collective called stegan0gram physically removed a Flock Safety roadside camera, extracted its stored data, and recovered an on-device encryption key meant to protect it. They shared the material with 404 Media and Distributed Denial of Secrets, which passed it to WIRED for joint analysis showing the camera logged roughly 50,200 vehicles and 1.6 million images over about 21 days.
DJI has introduced SDR Transmission II, a wireless video system for professional productions that transmits 4K 60 fps HDR footage at 50Mbps over distances up to 2.5 miles, doubling the bitrate and extending range compared to its predecessor. The system allows one transmitter to link with up to eight receivers, and larger setups can scale to five transmitters and 40 receivers for complex multi-camera shoots.
Polish developer Pawel Szydlowski launched an iPhone app called Zuckoff that uses Bluetooth signals to detect and estimate the distance of Meta's AI smart glasses, which have faced criticism for enabling covert recording. The app has attracted about 5,000 users and interest from EU regulators, while separately Meta is reportedly developing a camera-free version of its glasses and rolling out paid subscription tiers for its social apps to offset heavy losses at its Reality Labs division.
A group called stegan0gram removed a Flock roadside camera and dissected its Android storage, finding an encryption key inside the 'media' partition that unlocked another partition holding all recorded files. That data included about 1.6 million images and 27,321 short video clips gathered over 21 days, capturing roughly 50,200 vehicles and 11 people.