Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering over Polymarket bets made using the alias 'AlphaRaccoon,' has filed a motion to dismiss. His lawyers argue the wagers, which reportedly netted him over $1.2 million including a correct bet on singer D4vd, are informal gambling rather than regulated financial swaps, and that U.S. authorities lack jurisdiction since he is a non-U.S. citizen.
House Select Committee on China Chair John Moolenaar says TikTok backed out of a planned public roundtable meant to address Chinese government access to US user data and its algorithm. Moolenaar said TikTok withdrew on August 27th, a day after Meta settled with state attorneys general over child safety claims, and cited concerns about facing child safety questions despite that not being the meeting's focus.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pushed back on claims that ChatGPT usage consumes excessive water, comparing it to a viral claim that a single query uses as much water as running a shower for six hours. Speaking on the Sources Podcast, he said 38,000 queries equate to the water needed to grow one almond in California, and argued modern data centers no longer rely on evaporative cooling, instead using water similar to an office building.
RPCS3 developers publicly criticized Nvidia's unreleased DLSS 5 technology after modders leaked and tested the DLL on games and the PS3 emulator itself, calling the results 'slop' and accusing the industry of using upscaling and frame generation to mask poor optimization. Some users pushed back, arguing that DLSS and FSR frame generation can work alongside optimization efforts, with Reflex helping offset added latency. RPCS3 says it won't adopt such techniques, noting PS3-era games lack the motion-vector data needed for modern temporal upscalers.
A new United Nations report concludes that global temperatures will almost certainly exceed the 1.5°C threshold set under the Paris Agreement within just a few years. Climate scientists broadly agree the milestone is now unavoidable, though some worry the report fails to offer clear guidance on next steps.
TrendForce reports that Apple's memory component costs for the 256GB iPhone 18 Pro will be almost four times higher in Q3 2026 than a year earlier. The firm expects Apple to absorb much of that increase rather than fully pass it to consumers, projecting only around a $100 price hike over the iPhone 17 Pro, while leaning more on Services revenue to cushion margins.
Google has released WeatherNext 3, an updated AI weather forecasting model that generates hourly predictions using live satellite observations rather than relying solely on historical data. The model can resolve certain variables like temperature and moisture at up to 5-kilometer resolution, a sharp improvement over its predecessor's 25-kilometer, 6-hourly forecasts.
Microsoft has acknowledged that its optional KB5120998 preview update, released August 27, 2026, causes desktop backgrounds to reset to solid black on Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 devices. The company says the bug prevents desktop settings like wallpaper, slideshow options, and contrast themes from loading correctly, and affected users cannot manually restore their previous customizations. The same update was already flagged a day earlier for resetting mouse settings with similar restoration problems.
The UN Environment Program's new Limiting Overshoot report acknowledges that global temperatures will rise past the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C threshold, and instead focuses on how to minimize the severity and duration of that overshoot. The plan calls for nations to simultaneously cut greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero and deploy large-scale carbon dioxide removal, treating the latter as a supplement rather than a substitute for emissions cuts.
Google has launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, a successor to Gemini 3.7 Flash released just weeks earlier, which the company says performs more reasoning steps and iteratively calls tools on complex tasks. Input and output token pricing remains unchanged from the prior model, but Google cautions that the new model may consume more tokens overall to boost performance, particularly at higher effort settings. Early analysts note it beats rivals like Anthropic's models on coding, finance, and legal benchmarks, though it can end up pricier in practice due to higher token usage.
Greenpeace says the rollout of Apple's AI features, including the upcoming Siri overhaul, will strain the company's renewable energy commitments due to the heavy electricity and water demands of large-scale data centers. The environmental group, which has praised Apple's clean energy record for over a decade, says Apple must now prove it can scale AI without abandoning those climate goals.
The FTC and attorneys general from 22 states filed suit against Amazon, alleging the company secretly altered its ad-auction pricing after bids closed, extracting over $20 billion in extra charges from roughly 1.2 million advertisers since 2018. The complaint centers on a 'soft reserve' mechanism that reportedly raised final prices on Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display placements beyond the standard second-price model, with heavier markups during peak shopping periods like the holidays. Amazon has rejected the allegations, saying the government misunderstands how advertisers set bidding strategy.
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