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Berlin's government has been hit by a hacking incident in which attackers are reportedly demanding a ransom, according to Mayor Kai Wegner. Wegner said state police, prosecutors and federal security agencies are urgently investigating who is behind the breach and determining what data was compromised.
Thryv's 2026 AI and Small Business Adoption Survey found that AI adoption among small businesses rose from 55% to 66% year over year, with 70% reporting revenue gains and 92% saying it saves time. However, 70% of respondents said they still need more AI training, even though 86% describe themselves as comfortable using the tools.
Honor has begun selling its experimental Robot Phone in China, a device that hides a tiny three-axis gimbal mechanism behind the main 200-megapixel camera on its back. The company says it engineered a custom 2.6-gram motor to make the mechanism small enough to fit inside a handset, though the result is a 9.6mm-thick phone. Despite showing the device internationally at MWC 2026, Honor is limiting the launch to a small production run in its home market for now.
The European Commission classified ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine and Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms after each surpassed 45 million average monthly EU users. This designation subjects all three to the Digital Services Act's toughest compliance requirements, joining 28 other services already under this heightened oversight.
Apache Iggy, an open-source message streaming platform written in Rust, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a full Apache Software Foundation Top-Level Project after a unanimous vote on August 19, 2026. The project began in March 2023 as founder Piotr Gankiewicz's personal effort to learn Rust and study messaging internals, later evolving into a thread-per-core system using io_uring and Viewstamped Replication for consensus, achieving single-digit millisecond P99 latencies.
TIME's newly published 2026 TIME100 AI list left out Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su, despite both companies dominating GPU supply for AI infrastructure. Instead, the list includes figures like Ben Affleck, Bernie Sanders and Paris Hilton, while Nvidia's only representative is its sustainability chief Josh Parker, featured for work on data center energy use and cooling.
Golf media company Good Good lost its Callaway partnership, a PGA Tour title sponsorship, a Golf Channel series, and major retail apparel deals after a horror-spoof commercial showing founder Garrett Clark shoving a female colleague sparked accusations of promoting violence against women. CEO Matt Kendrick apologized and said the company will donate driver sales proceeds to a women's organization while adding new ad review protocols. Kendrick also publicly disputed Callaway's account, claiming the brand approved the spot before distancing itself and cutting ties.
An installation artist placed a working phone booth at Black Rock City's Temple of the Flying Spaghetti Monster corner, rewired to route calls over the internet instead of accepting coins. Attendees can dial a friend or loved one anywhere for five minutes free, or simply call the booth's public number hoping a passing stranger picks up.
C++26 introduces the concept of a hardened implementation for the standard library, where operations like std::vector's operator[] that previously caused undefined behavior on invalid access now trigger a defined contract violation instead—if the implementation enables hardening. The standard leaves it up to each implementation to decide whether and how this hardened mode is turned on.
MapQuest announced it would not rename Lake Ontario to 'Lake America' despite a Trump executive order directing federal agencies to update the name. Following the decision, MapQuest's iOS app jumped to No. 4 among all US App Store apps and became the top-ranked navigation app, with hundreds of thousands of new downloads and usage climbing to 50 times normal levels.
Microsoft has identified a new ClickFix-style attack called TerminalFix that uses fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA pages on compromised websites to trick users into pasting and running malicious PowerShell commands in Windows Terminal. Rather than deploying simple infostealers, the campaign runs a multi-stage chain that hides payloads inside PNG images via steganography, establishes persistence through scheduled tasks and registry keys, and ultimately installs a custom Python-based reverse tunnel into the victim's internal network.
In 1959, novelist and scientist C.P. Snow delivered Cambridge's Rede Lecture arguing that science and the humanities had split into mutually uncomprehending intellectual camps, a phrase that entered popular language as 'the two cultures.' Three years later, literary critic F.R. Leavis attacked Snow's argument as shallow and even called him a 'preposterous and menacing absurdity,' sparking one of the era's most heated intellectual feuds.