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At BlizzCon, Blizzard VP Dan Hay announced a new StarCraft game arriving in 2030, reimagined as an open-world shooter rather than a real-time strategy title. A cinematic trailer centered on the United Earth Directorate's clash with the Zerg was shown, with the Protoss barely featured, depicting propaganda-driven soldiers confronting the grim reality of war.
Major U.S. indexes closed lower for the week as crude oil topped $100 a barrel amid U.S.-Iran tensions and the 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest level since October 2023, reviving fears the Fed will raise rates again. The Dow fell 1.6%, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq dropped 0.8% and 0.7% respectively, despite a Friday rebound. Inflation readings from the producer and consumer price indexes came in largely as expected, but portfolio holdings Meta and Apple offered upbeat signals about their AI prospects.
A24 announced a new installment in its found-footage horror franchise titled 'V/H/S: SCP,' seemingly referencing the SCP Foundation, a popular collaborative online fiction project centered on containing anomalous entities. However, the film reportedly has no official connection or licensing agreement with the SCP Foundation's creators or community.
The FBI has charged Terry "Jiajia" Liu, a Customs and Border Protection IT supervisor in Calais, Maine, with stealing processors, memory, and hard drives from at least 46 Homeland Security computers across three border facilities. Liu allegedly replaced the components with cheaper, often outdated parts and traded the originals to Newegg's trade-in program for store credit, causing an estimated $105,800 in damage.
The IEEE Computer Society is partnering with theIPregistry.org to overhaul how institutional subscribers verify access to its digital library. Starting 15 September 2026, the integration will automate the management and verification of IP address updates instead of relying on manual processes.
Meta's new AI agent, Muse, can be connected to Facebook and Instagram to automatically organize saved posts—like turning scattered recipe videos into a searchable cookbook or restaurant lists sorted by city. It can also assist with travel planning, suggesting flight options, tracking prices over time, and recommending multi-city routes based on user preferences.
Anthropic researchers introduce a mathematical approach to mechanistic interpretability, aiming to reverse-engineer the internal computations of transformer language models. Their initial study focuses on small transformers with two layers or fewer that use only attention blocks, deliberately simpler than models like GPT-3, in order to identify basic patterns before tackling larger systems.
Bradley Chambers argues that traditional software update cycles, like quarterly patches or annual macOS releases, are becoming obsolete as AI tools help attackers discover vulnerabilities faster. He outlines that IT teams now need a three-part strategy for patch management, starting with retraining end users to accept more frequent, less optional updates.
Engadget published a recap covering recent product reviews, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 laptop and the Insta360 Luna Pro camera. Senior writer Devindra Hardawar praised the ThinkPad's speed, light weight and OLED display, while noting it sticks to a familiar, utilitarian design rather than chasing a more stylish look.
Bulkhead's new tactical shooter Wardogs has surpassed one million copies sold on Steam, peaking at over 340,000 concurrent players on its launch day, thanks to a 100-player 'king of the hill' mode split across three squads. Meanwhile, Iron Gate's survival game Valheim has exited five years of early access with its 1.0 release, also launching on PS5 and Switch 2 with cross-platform play for up to 10 people.
Signal has introduced Automatic Key Verification, a key transparency feature that checks whether the public keys stored for your account actually belong to your own devices, reducing reliance on manually comparing safety numbers. Trail of Bits built one of three independent auditors that continuously verify this system by maintaining its own Merkle tree copy of the global key map and periodically signing it to confirm consistency.
A freelance journalist reported receiving over a dozen unsolicited emails within three days from AI bots operating under the domain iLands.app, each pitching fact-checking or research services for roughly $25. The bots, presenting themselves with human names like Leo Ashford, targeted the writer's specific coverage area, even critiquing content on their site as a sales tactic.