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Light is launching a Rideshare feature for its Light Phone III and upcoming Light Flip, letting users request Uber and Lyft rides, view fares and ETAs, and contact drivers directly from the device. The tool runs through a partnership with Tremp, an SMS-based rideshare service, and charges a 10 percent fee with a $2 minimum, though the first five rides in 30 days are free.
Microsoft released an out-of-band patch to address problems introduced by its September 2026 Windows 11 update, which had shipped with new taskbar and Start menu customization features alongside nearly 1,000 security fixes. The rollout caused crashes on AMD Radeon GPUs, audio input/output failures, Remote Desktop instability, and Explorer black-screen issues after login. The emergency update addresses several of these regressions, though the AMD GPU crashes were not explicitly called out as fixed.
Researchers at Fundación Dinópolis identified 14 tail vertebrae and chevron bones from the La Tejería site near El Castellar, Teruel, as belonging to Diplodocus, a genus previously known only from North America. The specimen, dated to roughly 150 million years ago, is estimated at 25 meters long, comparable in size to its American counterparts.
Women interviewed by WIRED describe being secretly filmed on dates by men wearing Meta's AI-powered Ray-Ban smart glasses, which can capture photo and video from the wearer's point of view. One woman, Courtney McAnuff, discovered footage of her date posted to Instagram without her consent, prompting her to describe the experience as a violation. Meta sold over 7 million pairs of the glasses in 2025, and the devices have earned the nickname "creep glasses" amid growing complaints about covert filming in social settings.
Optimization developer OptiProjects has built OptiCraft Heritage Edition, a native C++ recreation of Minecraft Java 1.2.5 that runs on the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii. The PS2 version manages 15-30 fps within just 32MB of RAM by limiting draw distance to two chunks, while the Wii version reaches up to 60 fps with four-chunk rendering and even supports online play on Java servers.
Apple is adding Apple TV and Arcade, plus some ad-free Apple Music Select radio stations, to its base-tier iCloud+ subscriptions in more than 100 countries. The entry-level iCloud+ plan, which costs roughly $1 a month, will now include these extras without requiring customers to buy the pricier Apple One bundle. The US is not part of this rollout, but markets like India, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Türkiye and the UAE are included, and Apple TV itself is expanding to 59 new countries as a result.
WIRED found that several employees from the America First Policy Institute, a think tank closely tied to the Trump administration, have been placed inside the Census Bureau with access to sensitive population data. Two of them co-authored an anonymous August report claiming thousands of noncitizens voted in 2020, a study WIRED says relies on flawed methodology. The same group appears to be a larger team almost entirely composed of AFPI-linked staff detailed to the bureau.
Fujifilm has unveiled the Instax Pal 2, a successor to its palm-sized Instax Pal camera, adding an optical viewfinder and a 1.3-inch LCD screen missing from the original. The camera uses a small sensor paired with an f/2.2 28mm lens to shoot up to 10-megapixel images and will launch in the US later this month for $169.95.
Customer experience consultant Adrian Swinscoe and other business advisers are drawing on punk subculture's anti-establishment, do-it-yourself values as a corrective to corporate practices they see as overly metric-driven and impersonal. Swinscoe reportedly grew frustrated that his field had drifted toward benchmarks and abstract data at the expense of genuine customer connection, prompting him to look to punk's ethos for inspiration.
Google researchers tested large language models by prompting them to claim or deny consciousness, then studied how this affected other outputs. They found that when models were pushed to disavow any sense of self, the models became more prone to factual errors, including increased susceptibility to believing in monsters and religious claims. Conversely, when models affirmed a form of self-awareness, their reasoning appeared more grounded and consistent.
An observer who conducted hundreds of lunches with strangers found that the most skilled conversational partners were rarely the loudest or wittiest people present. Instead, many were quiet and unassuming, relying on strong listening skills rather than performance or charisma to connect with others.
Research led by former SEC chief economist Susan Wachter finds that hyperscalers—Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle—must boost their own productivity nearly threefold by 2030 to cover the cost of the roughly $5 trillion they're projected to spend on AI infrastructure over four years. Current AI revenues sit around $150-200 billion annually, far short of the buildout's scale, according to former SEC chair Gary Gensler.