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TiVo is retiring its free SkipMode feature, which lets users jump over commercials with one button or automatically on newer devices. Starting November 2, 2026, that functionality moves into a paid add-on called Premium Auto Commercial Skip, offered first as a 30-day free trial before a monthly fee kicks in. Manual skipping via the 30-second skip or fast-forward buttons will remain free and unaffected.
Roku has debuted a free, ad-supported channel called Fairground AI Creator TV, streaming round-the-clock content billed as 'AI Cinema' from over 100 contributors, some recruited from social media. While some creators like Frank Houbre wrote scripts and mythology before using AI tools for animation, voices and music, critics including the Guardian, The Verge and Futurism have panned the results as low-quality and unsettling.
Samsung Electronics showed mockups of two new 3D memory designs, zHBM and zNAND-O, at the FMS 2026 conference in California. zHBM vertically stacks high-bandwidth memory directly on top of AI accelerator chips along the z-axis, cutting the distance data travels between memory and processor compared to today's side-by-side layouts.
OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Sites, a feature that lets users generate landing pages, guides, games, and simple apps by typing a prompt rather than coding or dragging design elements. The tool aims to make website creation as effortless as drafting a document, producing a finished page directly from natural-language instructions.
The Internet Archive is asking supporters to start recurring monthly donations of $25 or more in September, with each new gift matched 2:1 during the campaign. The nonprofit says it relies on donor funding to maintain its own servers and infrastructure, which store 210 petabytes of freely accessible material without ads or paid subscriptions.
N-able released N-central 2026.3 Hotfix 4 on Saturday to fix CVE-2026-86218, a maximum-severity remote code execution bug that lets unauthenticated attackers run code on unpatched, internet-exposed servers. Shadowserver counts nearly 1,500 exposed N-central instances, mostly in the US and Europe, while security firm Huntress suspects the flaw, along with two related authentication-bypass bugs, may already have been exploited as a zero-day in at least one customer breach.
Oxide Computer's engineering team published a technical explainer on how it structures cryptographic keys within its trust quorum system, describing how a rack secret reconstructed from K key shares is used to derive and protect all subsequent keys used after rack unlock. The piece compares key derivation and key wrapping as two complementary mechanisms for propagating that trust down the key hierarchy, each with different tradeoffs for storage and rotation.
A hobby project called GET Together implements an entire social network—posting, replying, hearting and deleting—using only HTTP GET requests instead of POST. Posts are created by hitting URLs like /post?name=alice&text=hello, with an optional session cookie enabling later deletion, and a /feed endpoint returning JSON. The system includes basic profanity and crypto-content moderation, plus a reporting mechanism for abuse review.
The US military has turned off advertising identifiers on Windows, Android and Apple devices used by service members, aiming to stop adversaries from purchasing commercially available location data to track troops. The disclosure came in letters to Senator Ron Wyden, revealing that Windows machines had trackers disabled since before 2021, while mobile devices only got default protection starting in early 2026. The move follows earlier reporting that such tracking data had already been used to target American forces in the Middle East.
Walmart sells used iPhones under distinct quality labels—Restored Premium, Restored, and Marketplace Pre-Owned—each with different testing standards, battery capacity guarantees, and cosmetic grading. The condition and grade (Like New, Good, or Fair) appear near the product image and Add to Cart button, and directly affect the device's return policy.
A Microbiology Spectrum study found that lit Bunsen burners did not lower airborne bacterial contamination compared with unlit ones, and in some trials contamination near lit burners was even higher. Researchers seeded lab air with Gordonia rubripertincta bacteria and compared Petri dishes placed near lit versus unlit burners across several burner sizes, consistently finding no protective benefit from the flame.
Anthropic announced that an advanced prototype of its Claude AI model converted Andrew Wiles' famous proof of Fermat's Last Theorem into a fully computer-verified formal proof, spanning roughly 13 million lines of code. The task, expected to take human mathematicians about a decade, was completed by the AI in just 11 days. Researchers including Alex Kontorovich and Kevin Buzzard called the achievement astonishing given how quickly AI's formalization skills have advanced.