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Tech News
The uBlock Origin team has released version 1.74, which it says will be the last stable build available on the Chrome Web Store. Google plans to pull the extension from the store on August 31 as it finishes phasing out support for Manifest V2, the older extension platform uBlock Origin relies on. Chrome users searching the store are already seeing only the Manifest V3-based uBlock Origin Lite as a replacement.
A longtime Ruby on Rails developer and HEY email subscriber announced he is quitting the service after growing disillusioned with founder David Heinemeier Hansson's public statements. The writer, who once admired DHH's technical philosophy, says he can no longer support the company after DHH expressed views the writer characterizes as anti-immigrant and racially exclusionary regarding Europe.
Apple has silently fixed a flaw in iCloud Private Relay that allowed a user's real IP address to leak under three specific conditions, despite the feature being enabled. Security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk, who discovered the issue and built a public tool to test for it, confirmed the fix landed in iOS 26.6.1 (and matching updates for other Apple platforms) though Apple did not disclose it in official release notes. The researchers noted the repair appears limited to Safari and was made without them first reporting it to Apple.
Startup Keenable, founded by former Yandex search executive Andrey Styskin and AI scientist Matthias Petri, has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and angel investors. The company has built a search index spanning over 100 billion documents designed specifically for AI systems rather than human users, and its API is already being used by AI labs and inference providers for training and live retrieval, including a new partnership with voice AI company Gradium.
Scientists including Curtin University's Joshua Newton found that spiderwebs collect exceptionally rich environmental DNA from surrounding wildlife, outperforming other passive sampling methods like vegetation swabs, water, and soil in identifying vertebrate species. Because collecting real webs means destroying spider homes, University of Waikato genomicist Angela McGaughran tested synthetic Halloween webs instead, finding they captured DNA from livestock, birds, and even fungal spores just as effectively.
Researcher Matthew Callaghan discovered AliExpress running hidden scripts that generate silent, inaudible sound waves through the WebAudio API to create a unique fingerprint of each visitor's browser. He noticed the tracking only because it interfered with his multipoint Bluetooth headphones, cutting off phone audio whenever the AliExpress tab was open. The scripts muted the sound with a zero gain setting so users would never notice, but the browser still processed and transmitted the audio data back to the site.
Ben Blumenrose, co-founder of venture firm Designer Fund and a two-decade design veteran, says AI-generated website design has improved roughly fivefold in the past year. He still notices telltale AI patterns like pill-shaped buttons, floating dashboards and heavy gradients, but expects those distinctions to nearly vanish within six months to a year. Designer Fund has backed Framer, a no-code website design platform, as part of its bet on this shift.
Pew Research analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages using an AI detection tool and found that 10% of all sampled pages showed significant signs of AI authorship. Among pages published after ChatGPT's release, that figure jumps to more than one-third, with .com domains showing roughly double the AI-signal rate of .org sites and ten times that of .edu or .gov domains.
An engineer spent two weeks pointing an AI coding agent, Claude Opus 5, at the firmware and update tools of everyday USB peripherals—a microphone, a webcam, and a key light. The agent extracted a full command shell from the microphone, found a way to disable the webcam's recording LED while it still captures video, and discovered the key light accepts unauthenticated memory writes from any device on the same WiFi network.
An independent developer has released pngine, a declarative language and runtime built over 2.5 years that lets programmers describe WebGPU shaders and pipelines using S-expressions mirroring the WebGPU spec directly. The tool validates configurations via WGSL reflection without needing a live GPU context, offers an LSP for real-time error checking, and can export projects as a single HTML file, a ZIP, or even a self-contained PNG image holding compiled bytecode.
Promotional material for the upcoming film 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' has drawn scrutiny online after fans spotted visual inconsistencies suggesting the use of generative AI tools. Some observers argue the oddities are more likely the result of conventional Photoshop editing rather than AI generation, leaving the true cause unconfirmed.
A web developer describes replacing pixel-based CSS measurements with the ch unit (roughly a character's width) and the ex unit (the height of a lowercase letter) on a text-heavy blog. The goal is to size content width, padding, and margins in proportion to the text itself, using an approach like max-width: min(75ch, 100%) for readable line lengths.