A wave of polls and news reports indicates widespread American opposition to data centers, Flock surveillance cameras, and Meta's AI-equipped Ray-Ban glasses, which critics have nicknamed 'pervert glasses.' Recent events, including a grand jury declining to indict a man filmed damaging Flock equipment and protestors against data centers gaining online praise, underscore how deep and public this hostility has become.
UN human rights chief Volker Türk responded to Meta's settlement with almost all US states, which requires the company to add child safety features like time limits and parental controls. Meta has urged TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar measures, but Türk argued governments should not wait for litigation to force such protections across the whole industry.
Apple is reportedly preparing a new Apple TV 4K that could debut at its September 9 event, after being delayed from last fall. Leaked code and reports point to an updated Siri Remote, a faster A-series chip, the new N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and integration of Siri AI alongside broader Apple Intelligence features.
Ubisoft apologized after shipping a digital release of Heroes of Might and Magic III and its expansions that contained no actual game data, just a 23.4-kilobyte file that produced an error on launch. The mistake sparked a wave of negative Steam reviews before Ubisoft issued a fix, which Engadget confirmed now runs properly.
Meta is rolling out a software update that stops its smart glasses cameras from recording if the indicator light is covered after recording has already started. VP of AR Alex Himel confirmed the fix on Threads, addressing a loophole that had been widely shared in online tutorials for covert filming.
SK Hynix held a groundbreaking ceremony at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, for its first U.S. facility, a $4 billion plant dedicated to packaging high-bandwidth memory chips. CEO Kwak Noh-Jung said the site will become a key American production base for HBM by 2030, with its first cleanroom expected to open in October 2028, though actual chip manufacturing will still occur in South Korea and China.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, AMD and over 100 other companies and organizations signed a joint letter urging businesses and governments to urgently strengthen cybersecurity defenses as AI-driven threats accelerate. The signatories called for stronger security tools, wider adoption of both low-cost and frontier AI models, and government funding to help under-resourced sectors like hospitals and water utilities defend themselves.
Anthropic introduced the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a new interface allowing AI agents to interact with any device that has a programmable interface, from lab instruments to manufacturing equipment. The company likened it to USB-C, standardizing communication between AI systems and hardware, and said it's model-agnostic so it isn't limited to Anthropic's own Claude models. MHS is currently in a research preview with select science, robotics and manufacturing partners, with plans to eventually open-source it.
A team built a fuzzer with heavy AI code-generation assistance ('vibecoding') and used it to discover a division-by-zero vulnerability in FFmpeg, the widely used open-source multimedia framework. The bug was found through automated input generation and crash analysis rather than manual code review.
Meta has rolled out a software update that disables the camera on its AI smart glasses if the capture LED is covered while recording is already in progress, closing a gap some users exploited to record secretly. The company also launched a billboard and video campaign in markets where the glasses sell well, explaining that the blinking light indicates active recording.
The Slice 10, an ultrasonic craft knife that uses high-speed vibration instead of heat to slice materials, has surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal and remains available for backers at $119, roughly $100 below retail. A reviewer tested it on 3D-printed PLA and ABS, leather, DTF plastic, and cloth, finding it excelled at plastics and leather but performed weaker on fabric.
A term coined by developer Niklas Guhn in an August 3 blog post has gone viral online: 'meat proxy,' describing someone who copies and pastes chatbot output like ChatGPT or Claude into conversations without adding their own understanding or value. Guhn's original complaint was about receiving verbatim AI replies on Slack, and the phrase quickly spread on social media with a broader definition covering anyone who forwards AI text or code without reading or validating it themselves.
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