GoKawiil
Tech News
On his final day as Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook sent staff an emotional note thanking them for their work and reflecting on his tenure. He expressed confidence in incoming CEO John Ternus, praising his understanding of what it takes to build transformative products.
Sony Music and Warner filed a lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday, alleging the AI company trained its Claude models on tens of thousands of copyrighted song lyrics and compositions without permission. The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data, potentially totaling billions in damages, and cite songs like 'Livin' on a Prayer' and 'Hallelujah' among the works allegedly used.
Google has pushed a new update to the standalone Now Playing app on Pixel devices, tweaking its interface and reintroducing support for secondary user accounts on a device, a feature that had gone missing after the app was split out from Pixel's system settings in March. Android Authority also found early code evidence that Google is working on restoring song-recognition notifications and a history-sync feature, both of which were casualties of that earlier redesign.
Amazon's Labor Day sale is offering steep discounts on Apple products, including the AirTag 2 4-pack for $79.99 (about $20 per unit), its lowest price ever. Amazon Resale is also offering up to 60% off refurbished Apple items like MagSafe Battery packs, AirPods, and Apple Pencil, with an extra 30% off at checkout on some listings.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, about eight months earlier than planned. The spacecraft separated successfully and is now heading toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, roughly 1 million miles away, where it will settle into a stable orbit alongside Earth over the next three months.
Hebbian Robotics, part of YC's Summer 2026 batch, has released HFlow, an open source SDK designed to manage large-scale multimodal data pipelines for robotics and physical AI. The tool automates orchestration, versioning, quality checks, and provenance tracking for datasets combining video, sensor state, and action data, using MCAP as its standard input/output format. The project is currently pre-v1 but functional end-to-end for local use.
OpenClaw released version 2026.8.1, branded as 2.0, marking its biggest update since launching last November. The overhaul began as a plan to simplify installation and rebuild the browser client but expanded into a full codebase rework, involving 933 contributors and over 16,000 merged pull requests.
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.