A new roundup evaluates Windows uninstaller tools that go beyond the operating system's built-in removal features, useful for broken uninstall processes, bulk app removal, or clearing leftover files and registry entries. IObit Uninstaller is highlighted as a standout freemium option, offering batch removal, forced uninstall, bundleware detection, and an Install Monitor that tracks setup changes for more accurate future cleanup.
The ATF acknowledged that a standalone system separate from its main network was compromised, calling it a 'major incident' after the Qilin ransomware gang listed the agency on its dark web leak site. The agency said the affected system does not connect to its enterprise network or eForms platform, and is now working with the Department of Justice to investigate the breach.
Barret Zoph, a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, has left the startup to join Google as a vice president of research. Zoph had previously spent time at OpenAI before helping start Thinking Machines Lab.
LAION has published LAION-BVD, a large open video dataset intended to support multimodal research on video, audio, and image models. The organization says the release is meant for non-commercial, academic use only, aimed at improving reproducibility and transparency in a field increasingly dominated by proprietary corporate datasets.
Sentelabs.ai has launched Open Executive, an open-source AI system designed to act as a virtual executive suite for companies. It coordinates eight specialist AI agents—covering strategy, finance, HR, legal, operations, marketing, product, and board communications—through an orchestrator built on Claude Sonnet, presenting all responses through a single unified executive voice.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang defended the company's expanding financial backing of AI startups and data center projects, arguing critics misunderstand the unprecedented capital needs of building and deploying AI. He spoke on CNBC after Nvidia posted stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings, noting the firm has invested in model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic and backed massive compute projects, including a $105 billion Ohio campus and a $500 billion Wall Street financing partnership.
A tech roundup recommends external displays for buyers of Apple's newly released Mac mini and Mac Studio, highlighting Apple's own Studio Display and the newer Studio Display XDR as standout choices. The Studio Display offers a 27-inch 5K panel, a 12MP Center Stage webcam, True Tone technology, and Thunderbolt 5 ports, while the XDR variant adds mini-LED technology and a 120Hz refresh rate.
Instinct, founded last year by 23-year-old Noah Shinn under parent company Spear Street Technology, has closed a $250 million Series B round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. The deal pushes the young startup's total funding to $350 million and its valuation to $2.5 billion, driven by buzz around its AI assistant that manages users' schedules, purchases and subscriptions through texts and calls.
A new emulator called Afterglow lets users run original After Dark screen saver modules, including Flying Toasters and Fish, directly on modern macOS. Unlike previous methods that required emulating vintage Macintosh hardware or classic Mac OS, Afterglow runs the original 68k module code natively without needing ROMs or an emulated operating system. The project was built as a software preservation effort to keep these 1990s animations usable and accessible.
Palaeoclimatologist Julia Cole and colleagues reconstructed a millennium of sea surface temperatures using Galápagos coral skeletons, published in Science. They found that strong El Niño events have occurred more often over the past century, since industrial-era greenhouse gas emissions began, than in the thousand years before it.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center on 30 August after completing vibration testing at Goddard Space Flight Center. The telescope's wide field of view and infrared sensitivity are expected to let it survey far more sky in far less time than the Hubble Space Telescope, dramatically expanding the catalog of known exoplanets.
A mining-engineering professor in China describes being repeatedly denied underground access for research, despite designing systems meant to operate in those very environments. She notes that laws such as China's 2012 labor-protection statute, along with similar rules in dozens of countries, prohibit women from underground mine work without distinguishing between routine labor shifts and brief, supervised technical visits.
GoKawiil