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Tech News
A federal lawsuit filed by the FTC alleges that Amazon secretly raised minimum price thresholds in some advertising auctions after bids were already submitted, effectively changing the rules mid-game. The suit claims this practice forced advertisers to pay more than they should have, generating billions in extra revenue for Amazon.
CNET published the full solution set for the NYT Mini Crossword puzzle dated Sept. 1, 2026, listing all across and down clues with their answers. Highlights include a British Royal Family reference, with 4-Down clued as Prince Archie's relation to Harry and Meghan, answered SON.
The August 31, 2026 episode of 9to5Mac Daily summarized the day's top Apple stories, including a reported price hike for the Apple TV app or hardware. The podcast, produced by 9to5Mac and hosted across platforms like Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn and Google Play, is sponsored by the task-management app Stuff.
The Florida Department of Transportation issued a memo on Aug. 31 revoking permits for automated license plate recognition cameras, often known by the brand name Flock, installed along state highway rights-of-way. Local law enforcement agencies have 30 days to remove the devices or FDOT will take them down itself, citing rapid growth in deployments and concerns about misuse and surveillance.
DoltLite, a fork of SQLite that swaps its B-tree storage layer for a Git-style Prolly Tree engine, has reached Beta status at version 0.50.0 just five months after launch. The project reuses SQLite's SQL parser, analyzer and file system code untouched, while the underlying storage was rebuilt to support branching, merging, diffing and syncing like Dolt and Git. The maintainers say the work was largely completed through around 2,000 pull requests generated by AI coding agents using an orchestrator called Gas Town.
A technical retrospective examines a decompiled 2004 RuneScape 2 client to explain how Jagex packed a 3D game world with up to a couple thousand concurrent players onto connections as slow as 5 KB/s. The analysis traces a single player movement command byte-by-byte from click to server to another player's screen, revealing the extreme data-efficiency techniques used. These core network principles reportedly persisted from RuneScape Classic through to Old School RuneScape and RuneScape 3 today.
An essay examines the 'deadpan' style of photography, popularised by artists like Andreas Gursky, which mimics scientific or documentary imagery through flat lighting, even focus, and square framing. The piece argues that despite its appearance of neutrality, deadpan photographs like Gursky's '99 Cent' are carefully composed and manipulated works, not raw records of reality.
Bengaluru startup Alteon, founded by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, secured $2.5 million in pre-seed funding led by investor Lachy Groom, with Together Fund also participating. The company is developing small autonomous fixed-wing aircraft that mimic albatross flight patterns to extract energy from ocean wind shear, aiming to keep planes airborne for over a year without traditional fuel or battery limits. Alteon has tested its autonomous flight system over the Bay of Bengal but has not yet proven sustained flight purely from harvested wind energy.
Apple has filed fresh court evidence, including a forensic review of former engineer Chang Liu's old work laptop, alleging he used a confidential Apple circuit schematic and an internally named engineering tool while working at OpenAI. Apple also claims Liu enlisted OpenAI colleague Yu-Ting Peng to destroy evidence once he learned of the investigation, and that he exploited an authentication flaw to retain system access after leaving.
Star Elevator earned Elevator World's Project of the Year award for modernizing the century-old vertical transportation system at San Francisco's Metropolis Trust Building, a Category 1 Historic Landmark at 625 Market Street. The project involved upgrading rail systems to meet modern seismic codes, replacing pushbutton and signal fixtures, and renovating cab interiors, all while addressing unreliable machinery including a car that had been taken out of service due to safety concerns.
A gene-editing therapy designed to permanently lower cholesterol has shown sustained reductions in patients for at least 12 months after a single treatment. The therapy uses CRISPR technology to edit genes tied to cholesterol regulation, aiming for a one-time fix rather than daily medication.
A photo of juvenile lobsters being reared at the UK National Lobster Hatchery before release into the wild was named a finalist for Ocean Photographer of the Year 2026. The image is part of a broader roundup of standout science photography from the past month, curated by Nature's photo team.