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TechCrunch has announced that its current discounted ticket pricing for Disrupt 2026 expires Friday, Sept. 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT, after which rates rise. The conference will take place October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, expecting over 10,000 founders, investors, and tech leaders.
A Texas Air National Guard F-16 went down in Michigan on Thursday afternoon during a training exercise, forcing an evacuation of homes and businesses within a mile of the crash site over a chemical spill. The pilot ejected safely and was taken to a hospital, while all Texas Air National Guard aircraft at the site were grounded pending investigation. One pilot reportedly told air traffic control his wingman may have struck a bird before the crash.
Endeavor's Ari Emanuel has released a memoir this fall centered on his career negotiating high-stakes entertainment deals, positioned as a standout title in the season's nonfiction lineup. The related coverage also includes a broader etiquette guide addressing modern social behaviors like spoiler alerts, phone use at restaurants and concert conduct.
A tech feature compiled a list of ten niche Japanese gadgets, ranging from an AI companion shaped like a meerkat that remembers past conversations to a handheld umbrella with a built-in fan, that are largely absent from American retail shelves. The author sourced these products by digging through Japan's domestic gadget market, deliberately focusing on inventions rarely exported abroad.
Reporting revisits comments made by leading AI company founders, including figures behind OpenAI and Anthropic, who warned of existential risks from artificial intelligence even as they built their firms. These statements, made years before recent viral discussions, framed advanced AI as a potential threat to humanity while the same executives pursued its development. The resurfacing of these quotes has fueled renewed scrutiny of the tension between AI leaders' public warnings and their commercial ambitions.
Tom's Hardware Premium's weekly roundup covered Valve's release of the Steam Frame VR headset with an interview of its engineers, an investigation into worsening DRAM and NAND shortages now hitting SLC and NOR Flash, and PieceMakers' Taiwan stock debut pitching hybrid-bonded chips as an alternative to HBM for AI inference. The issue also detailed a public dispute among AI leaders after a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee warned advanced AI could threaten humanity by 2030, prompting rebuttals from Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.
A TechInsights teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro Max confirms that the US model uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 modem instead of Apple's own C2 chip, which powers the device everywhere else and in the smaller iPhone 18 Pro globally. The X80 is the same modem found in last year's iPhone 17 Pro line, meaning Apple hasn't fully extended its in-house modem rollout to this specific US model.
AttritoM7 Productions has released Blackwood: Act One on Steam, a hybrid action-life sim set in 2012 where players run a DVD rental store by day and carry out stylized gunfights by night. The roughly six-hour first act is priced at $25 (10% off until September 23) and includes access to two additional acts slated for 2027. Early impressions note clunky combat, shaky audio, and poor car handling despite promising ideas like weapon customization and Max Payne-inspired bullet time.
Howard Buffett, son of Warren Buffett, is reportedly assuming a more active part in preserving the values and structure his father established at Berkshire Hathaway. The move comes as attention also turns to María Corina Machado's plans to return to Venezuela and Apple's latest iPhone and watch releases.
A new Politico survey of over 2,000 US adults found that 62 percent would stop AI development if they saw signs it could threaten humanity, including 55 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of Democrats. Despite this bipartisan skepticism, Democratic strategists are reportedly urging candidates in swing states to avoid criticizing AI or data centers ahead of the midterms, fearing retaliation from the tech industry's lobbying power.
Android Authority's Andrew Grush says he still installs the third-party app AccuBattery on his Android phones, even as most performance-boosting battery apps have proven ineffective over the years. He explains that AccuBattery doesn't try to magically extend battery life but instead helps identify software or hardware issues causing excess drain, using pattern-recognition data gathered over time rather than the factory-calibrated data used by built-in OS tools.
Security researcher Gal Weizman of Forever Security found that a single malicious browser extension could take over AI assistants embedded in Chrome, Edge, Opera Neon, Perplexity Comet and Claude in Chrome, using Chromium's declarativeNetRequest feature to manipulate trusted network traffic without any user interaction. The technique, called BragJack, earned Weizman over $20,000 in bug bounties across the five vendors and generated two CVEs, with Google and Microsoft having already patched the issues.