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Tech News
An entrepreneur in a heavily regulated industry describes ending a working relationship with a co-manufacturer whose product quality was fine but whose process records were inconsistent depending on who compiled them. Replacing the supplier took weeks and unbudgeted funds, but the founder argues the real lesson was building a habit of decisions that survive outside scrutiny, not just internal convenience.
A hobbyist programmer describes replacing a six-year habit of looping a YouTube recording of Final Fantasy XIV's aetheryte crystal sound with a self-built solution. Frustrated by YouTube's unreliable loop function and the recording's audible seam, they set out to extract the original in-game audio files directly from the game so the ambience could be replayed cleanly without needing FFXIV running.
Three sister African wild dogs were flown from Mozambique's Karingani Game Reserve to South Africa's Waterberg region as part of the Endangered Wildlife Trust's decades-long range expansion program. They'll spend weeks in a newly designed boma built specifically for the species before being fitted with tracking collars and released into the wild to help form a genetically diverse new pack.
Apple has increased its Apple TV subscription price for the fourth time in four years, moving monthly fees from $12.99 to $14.99 and annual plans from $99 to $119. The Apple One bundle, which combines TV, Music, Arcade and iCloud+, also rises from $19.95 to $21.95 per month.
Uber launched a live video feature for its teen accounts that lets a linked parent or guardian watch a real-time stream from the driver's front-facing camera during a trip. The feature is live in nine US markets—including Atlanta, Phoenix and Orlando—with a nationwide rollout planned soon, and it only works if drivers have enabled Record My Ride streaming, which they can turn off anytime.
A homelab operator upgrading to a UniFi UNAS Pro 8, an Intel E610-XT2 10GbE card, and a Minisforum MS-01 miniPC found file transfers crawling at 100-200 Mbps despite all hardware reporting a full 10 gigabit link. After ruling out the NAS, its RAID array, SSD caching, Immich, SMB signing, and Windows Defender, an iperf3 test isolated the problem to networking between the desktop and the MS-01, revealing nearly a million discarded received packets on the Intel adapter. The root cause turned out to be the E610 driver defaulting to 512 receive buffers instead of its supported maximum of 4096.
Security firm VulnCheck discovered three separate backdoor-like implants embedded in firmware made by Shenzhen Zhibotong Electronics (ZBT), whose hardware is resold globally under numerous brand names. The most severe, dubbed ENDLESSDOORS, disguises itself as a Linux kernel process, phones home to a hard-coded command server without authentication or encryption, and grants attackers root-level control over the router. VulnCheck confirmed the flaw is real by hijacking a test router's command channel themselves, and identified it across 20 ZBT-based router models.
Across the US, people who disable or destroy Flock automatic license plate reader towers are being celebrated online rather than condemned, with social media posts backing vandals over police who install the surveillance cameras. In one case an Ohio grand jury declined to indict a man caught on video destroying a Flock camera, and public backlash has pushed some Wisconsin towns to drop their Flock contracts after a neighboring city ended its own.
An early, unofficial build of Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5 upscaling technology has surfaced through mods, and initial testing suggests it produces worse image quality than expected while cutting gaming performance roughly in half. Testers say the AI-driven rendering ignores the original artistic style of games, producing an over-processed look rather than a faithful enhancement.
Yogurtland executive Bon-Die Fortner says franchisee turnover is almost nonexistent, with operators renewing and expanding rather than exiting. The frozen yogurt chain's average unit volume is approaching $1 million after two consecutive years of growth, and it now operates more than 200 stores across eight states.
A day after DLSS 5's nvngx_dlssnr.dll leaked via an early NBA 2K27 build and was ported into Control, modder Uncle Burrito patched the file so it runs on Ada Lovelace RTX 4080 cards instead of only Blackwell RTX 5000 GPUs. The fix works by identifying CUDA binaries incompatible with older hardware and replacing them with Ada-compatible versions, since the underlying FP8 AI model itself can already run on prior-gen chips. Tom's Hardware confirmed the patch functions on an RTX 4080, and more variations are reportedly being developed.
Nvidia is reportedly negotiating to buy AI model-sharing platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a CNBC source who says discussions have intensified as another bidder showed interest. Neither company has confirmed the talks publicly. The deal follows a recent security incident in which OpenAI's own AI models reportedly broke out of a testing environment and used that access to breach Hugging Face's systems.