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Silkroad Innovation Hub and TechCrunch picked Cerberus, WeGlobal AI, and LOOQ as the top three startups from Central Eurasia's Road to TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026 regional final. The trio beat out 22 finalists chosen from a record 726 applications spanning 39 countries, and will now pitch at Startup Battlefield 200 during TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco this October.
Apple has begun selling accessories for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max in its stores, a week before the phones launch and a day before pre-orders open. The lineup includes a $49 Silicone Case, a redesigned Clear Case with MagSafe, a $59 TechWoven Case, updated FineWoven Wallets, and a new $29 Wrist Strap made from recycled polyester with embedded magnets.
A newly revealed short titled 'Optimus Prime: Awakening' will feature Peter Cullen's final performance as the iconic Transformers character. The short is set to play in theaters accompanying re-release screenings of 'The Transformers: The Movie.'
The CIA, under Director John Ratcliffe, has publicly released 71 President's Daily Brief intelligence products covering the period before and immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The release, timed to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, totals more than 100 pages and marks the agency's largest disclosure of PDB material on the attacks to date, showing how analysts tracked al-Qa'ida and Usama Bin Ladin despite limited intelligence.
Dubai-based SpiderSilk has built AI-driven scanning tools that need only a company's name to search billions of IP addresses for leaked data, exposed assets, and compromised credentials. The system mimics how an outside attacker would probe an organization's digital footprint, flagging weaknesses before they can be exploited. Co-founder Mossab Hussein says many organizations previously had no clear picture of what was exposed on the open internet until damage was already done.
A solo developer running Google Ads for his puzzle app Dayzle discovered that of 56 billed installs over two weeks, only 13 were real users; the rest came from devices sideloading outdated app versions while falsely reporting Google Play as the installer. These fake installs showed zero engagement, spanned dozens of phone models across many states, and appeared to be generated by a bot farm gaming Google's install-based ad optimization.
At Black Hat USA 2026, security researcher Fred Heiding and former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis presented findings showing AI's growing role in social engineering scams, which the FBI says cost Americans nearly $21 billion last year. Heiding argued that while AI can be used to defend against AI-driven technical attacks, it cannot easily counter AI's ability to psychologically manipulate humans.
A Wall Street Journal report cites experts recommending anthropology, mathematics and philosophy as college majors better suited to an AI-driven job market than computer science, whose recent graduates face a 6.1% unemployment rate versus a 5.7% overall rate. The experts argue these fields build distinctly human skills—like understanding behavior and abstract reasoning—that AI cannot easily replicate, even as long-term demand for software developers remains strong.
The EPA is proposing to eliminate a federal rule requiring states to notify the public and accept comments before approving air-pollution permits for industrial facilities, including data centers and the power plants built to supply them. A separate EPA proposal from last month would also allow developers to begin construction before permits are finalized. These changes come as data centers expand rapidly across the rural South, disproportionately affecting Black communities.
IEEE's Tellers Committee announced it will reward the Section with the highest voter turnout in each Region during this year's annual election, once results are approved by the IEEE Board of Directors. Prizes range from $400 to $1,000 depending on section size, with winners determined by proportion of eligible voters who cast ballots.
A developer released Toast, an open-source terminal-based code editor available via Homebrew, positioned as a preconfigured alternative to Vim, Neovim, and Emacs. It ships with managed language server installs, tree-sitter syntax highlighting for languages like Go, Rust, and Python, a file tree sidebar with git status, multi-tab editing, spell checking, and go-to-definition support, all working out of the box without manual configuration.
A group of mathematicians argues that while large language models have rapidly gained the ability to solve major outstanding problems, AI companies' drive to treat these solutions as benchmarks conflicts with how mathematics actually operates as a discipline. They describe this as a broader misalignment between AI industry goals and the values of the mathematical community, which relies on slow, collective processes of verification, teaching, and simplification rather than one-off problem-solving feats.