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Tech News
A veteran branding professional contends that many well-crafted marketing campaigns fail not because of poor creative work, but because employees deliver poor service once customers arrive. The piece argues that increased foot traffic from ad campaigns often doesn't convert into sales when staff aren't engaged or properly trained to serve those customers.
TiVo is retiring its free SkipMode feature, which lets users jump over commercials with one button or automatically on newer devices. Starting November 2, 2026, that functionality moves into a paid add-on called Premium Auto Commercial Skip, offered first as a 30-day free trial before a monthly fee kicks in. Manual skipping via the 30-second skip or fast-forward buttons will remain free and unaffected.
The Internet Archive is asking supporters to start recurring monthly donations of $25 or more in September, with each new gift matched 2:1 during the campaign. The nonprofit says it relies on donor funding to maintain its own servers and infrastructure, which store 210 petabytes of freely accessible material without ads or paid subscriptions.
Anthropic announced that an advanced prototype of its Claude AI model converted Andrew Wiles' famous proof of Fermat's Last Theorem into a fully computer-verified formal proof, spanning roughly 13 million lines of code. The task, expected to take human mathematicians about a decade, was completed by the AI in just 11 days. Researchers including Alex Kontorovich and Kevin Buzzard called the achievement astonishing given how quickly AI's formalization skills have advanced.
The publisher has issued a formal author correction to a previously published paper reporting that inhibiting the AhR protein promotes nerve axon regeneration through a stress-to-growth cellular switch. The correction notice itself does not detail what specific errors were fixed, only confirming that changes were made to the original publication.
A tech reviewer compiled a list of 10 connected gadgets designed to improve backyard spaces, covering categories like entertainment, lawn maintenance, lighting and security. The recommendations span both novel devices and smart add-ons that make existing outdoor equipment more automated.
Austin Z. Henley, a Microsoft engineer, built a minimalist Python interpreter written in C that fits within 1024 bytes of code, after an initial attempt at 512 bytes proved too small. The interpreter supports a limited subset of Python syntax—including def, colons, indentation, and parenthesis-free if statements—enough to run a FizzBuzz program, but skips CPython's full tokenizing, AST, and bytecode pipeline in favor of global variables and a fixed-length array.
Apple's built-in Time Machine utility lets Mac users back up apps, photos, videos and documents to an external hard drive or SSD without paying for cloud storage subscriptions. The initial backup takes longer, but subsequent backups run faster and can be scheduled hourly, daily or weekly. This offers an alternative for users who don't need remote file access but want reliable backups.
A developer working on remote attestation for confidential VMs describes a technique for signing TLS handshake data using a private key generated and held inside a Trusted Platform Module, rather than storing it as a plain file on disk. The approach targets mutual TLS client authentication, where a stolen private key normally lets an attacker impersonate the machine anywhere that certificate is trusted.
Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge system designed to block aggressive AI scrapers, has finally shipped a WebAssembly-based version after roughly a year of development. The tool works similarly to Hashcash, forcing browsers to solve a computational puzzle before accessing a website, which is negligible for individual users but costly at scraper scale. Site administrators use it as a stopgap measure while better methods for detecting headless browsers are developed.
Honda's Prologue EV is essentially a rebadged Chevrolet Blazer EV, built on the same GM underpinnings but sold with a key difference: it retains Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support, which GM stripped from its own EVs in favor of a Google-built Android Automotive OS. This near-identical pairing of vehicles, one with phone mirroring and one without, has effectively created an unplanned real-world test of how much consumers value that feature.
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming their journalism was used without permission to train AI models and is often reproduced verbatim in chatbot responses. Microsoft was named as a defendant because its Copilot tool relies on OpenAI's technology, and the outlets are seeking destruction of any copied works, datasets, and models built from them.