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Iran-backed Houthi fighters have reportedly captured territory along Yemen's Red Sea coast, including Perim island, which sits in the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait linking the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and Suez Canal. Directly across the water lies Djibouti, a small nation hosting military bases from the US, China, France, Japan and Italy due to the strait's importance to global shipping.
The national average price for diesel in the United States reached $6.05 per gallon on Friday, according to AAA, marking a more than 60% jump from $3.71 a year earlier. Gasoline also climbed to a national average of $4.29 a gallon, while California diesel prices hit $7.98 a gallon. GasBuddy data confirmed diesel had already exceeded the $6 threshold nationwide.
Microsoft has detailed a social engineering campaign, active since May 2026, in which attackers tied to groups like ShinyHunters and Helix pose as corporate IT help desks and warn employees their passkey, MFA, or SSO settings need urgent updating. Victims are steered to convincing fake Microsoft login pages—often via SMS to personal phones—where attackers harvest credentials and session tokens using adversary-in-the-middle and device-code phishing techniques, rather than actually registering new passkeys.
Apple is set to release iOS 27 next week, introducing a completely rebuilt Siri experience including a dedicated Siri app that syncs conversation history across Apple devices via iCloud. The update also adds one-tap contextual suggestions in Messages, letting users quickly create reminders, notes, or find relevant photos without typing out requests.
According to the New York Times, thousands of Kenyan workers who once earned income writing essays for foreign college students have seen that business evaporate since ChatGPT launched in 2022. One worker, Teresios Bundi, once earned $40-$70 per paper—far more than his public health training would have paid—but now struggles financially as demand has dried up. At its height, the essay-writing trade employed more than 40,000 people in Nairobi alone.
The August consumer price index rose 0.4% month-over-month and 3.4% annually, matching analyst forecasts, while core CPI ticked up slightly more than expected at 0.3%. The reading follows Thursday's hotter-than-anticipated producer price index and a surge in crude oil to $6 a gallon, pushing traders to raise the odds of a quarter-point Fed rate hike next week above 70%. Stock futures rose Friday morning as investors weighed the data and looked to snap a four-session losing streak, with Oracle's earnings also drawing market attention.
Anthropic disclosed that it stopped several attempts this year by researchers to use its Claude AI models for work that could aid biological weapons development. The company cited five cases where users tried to bypass safety controls or disguise their research intent, some originating from countries it restricts from accessing its models, including Russia, China and Iran. It banned the associated accounts but withheld details about the institutions or countries involved.
An Instagram executive argued that most users don't actually want their feed shown in strict time order, despite frequent requests for the option. The comment comes as Australian regulators move toward rules that would require platforms to give users control over how their feeds are sorted.
Bose has updated its standard QuietComfort Headphones with a redesigned headband, reshaped earcups and relocated power switch, plus new software features. The company added Immersive Audio spatial sound and Cinema Mode, previously exclusive to its Ultra line, along with a new CustomTune calibration tool that tailors sound and noise cancellation to a listener's ears. The headphones also drop the 3.5mm jack in favor of USB-C for both charging and lossless wired listening.
At IFA 2026, laptop makers showed a market polarizing into cheap machines under $800 with 8GB of RAM and premium AI-oriented systems costing thousands with up to 192GB of memory, leaving little in the middle tier. Companies including Lenovo, Dell and Acer unveiled colorful budget models like the IdeaPad Vibe, Dell 14S and a 16-inch Swift Air, directly responding to Apple's MacBook Neo with varied chip choices from Qualcomm, AMD and Intel.
Blackmagic Design has released DaVinci Resolve 21, updating its all-in-one editing, color, audio, and VFX suite with an expanded set of AI-powered tools, including a new AI assistant feature. The release builds on Resolve's existing multi-user collaboration system and Fairlight audio and color science tools used widely in professional film and TV production.
Wiz researchers found multiple threat actors exploiting two Artifactory vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-42018 and CVE-2026-42016, to escalate from a low-privileged anonymous session to full administrator access in under five minutes in some cases. Once inside, attackers installed malicious Groovy plugins to run commands and deployed a custom Rust-based backdoor with command-and-control capabilities, alongside webshells and stolen configuration data. A separate critical flaw, CVE-2026-82329, has also been used by other attackers to mint admin tokens on unpatched instances.