GoKawiil
Tech News
OpenAI has temporarily disabled new subscriptions to its $200-per-month Pro plan after unprecedented demand for its Astra model overwhelmed its infrastructure. Product lead Thibault Sottiaux said the Pro tier strains systems the most, so the company chose to pause it rather than degrade service for existing users. Other offerings, including API access and the Go and Plus plans, remain open to new customers.
Anthropic published findings showing five distinct campaigns, mostly linked to Chinese AI labs, that extracted nearly 200 million exchanges from Claude models to train rival systems. The largest, attributed to Alibaba, alone generated 151 million exchanges between May and recent months, using tricks like disguised translation requests to expose the model's hidden reasoning steps.
A federal judge in California dismissed two proposed class actions accusing LinkedIn of illegally scanning users' browser extensions, ruling that the plaintiffs failed to show they actually had extensions installed that leaked private data to the company. Judge Vince Chhabria allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaints but expressed skepticism they could ever establish a valid privacy claim, given that browser extensions are voluntarily installed and inherently share data with websites. One plaintiff's attorney says he may refile in state court or appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter results that topped Wall Street forecasts, with adjusted earnings of $1.92 per share and revenue of $19.35 billion, both above LSEG estimates. Revenue climbed nearly 30% year over year, driven largely by rapid growth in cloud infrastructure as Oracle pushes deeper into AI-related data center buildouts. The company raised its long-term outlook, now projecting $8.10 in adjusted earnings per share on at least $90 billion in revenue for fiscal 2027.
Furo, a startup building software for industrial battery storage systems, has raised $4 million from mostly U.S. investors including TQ Ventures, Neo, and Sheryl Sandberg's Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. The three 28-year-old founders, originally from Germany, moved back home after studying and briefly operating in the Bay Area, and within a year landed enterprise clients like Deutsche Bahn. Co-founder Lena Sophia Voß says the company is scaling faster in Europe than it would have in the U.S.
Meta has begun onboarding contributors to test Community Notes across 16 Latin American nations including Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia, following its US rollout that replaced professional fact-checkers. During this testing phase, notes won't be visible to users and existing third-party fact-checking arrangements remain unchanged, but Meta has signaled it eventually intends to fully transition away from professional fact-checking once the crowd-sourced system proves effective.
Apple continues to frame its artificial intelligence efforts around everyday usefulness rather than grand claims of achieving superhuman or godlike machine intelligence. This contrasts with rivals who often emphasize dramatic warnings or promises about AI's transformative, even existential, power.
Apple TV released a trailer for The Last First: Winter K2, a documentary directed by Amir Bar-Lev arriving on the service October 2. The film centers on a dangerous 2021 winter expedition to summit K2, following climbers John Snorri Sigurjónsson and Ali and Sajid Sadpara as they compete alongside influencers, commercial clients and a Nepalese team.
A developer describes abandoning Git for personal projects after learning of a proposal within the Git project to make Rust mandatory. Citing long experience with systems like RCS, CVS, SVN, Mercurial and Bazaar, they chose Fossil as a replacement, noting its C codebase, small footprint, and simpler workflow without a staging area.
Microsoft says threat groups Storm-3032 and Storm-3121 have been calling or texting employees on personal devices since May, posing as internal IT helpdesks to steal credentials and bypass corporate authentication protections. The attackers then abuse the Microsoft Graph API to exfiltrate corporate data at scale, and researchers believe they hand off this access to extortion gangs such as ShinyHunters. No specific breaches have yet been tied directly to these campaigns.
A compiled overview details several harmless but often puzzling bodily phenomena, including ASMR tingling sensations, benign muscle twitches, vertigo from BPPV, brain freeze, and brain zaps linked to antidepressant withdrawal. Each condition is described with its typical triggers, prevalence estimates, and reassurance that they are not signs of serious disease.
WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast examines a viral resignation from an Anthropic researcher who argued AI could plausibly cause human extinction within ten years. The episode also covers Apple's newly unveiled $2,000 foldable iPhone Duo, privacy concerns around 'always listening' Apple Watch features, and a WIRED investigation into flawed Census Bureau data cited by the Trump administration.