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Tech News
Apple is increasing Apple TV's monthly subscription from $12.99 to $14.99, with the annual plan rising from $99 to $119. Apple One bundle pricing is also going up, with the individual tier moving from $19.95 to $21.95 monthly. This follows a similar increase to Apple Music announced roughly a month earlier.
A commentary piece introduces the German word Verschlimmbesserung—an attempted fix that makes things worse—to describe common SaaS updates that break workflows or move UI elements without real benefit. The author traces this to management incentive structures, citing Eliyahu Goldratt's idea that flawed metrics produce flawed behavior, arguing teams ship unnecessary changes because release frequency, not actual improvement, is what gets measured and rewarded.
Uber launched a live video feature for its teen accounts that lets a linked parent or guardian watch a real-time stream from the driver's front-facing camera during a trip. The feature is live in nine US markets—including Atlanta, Phoenix and Orlando—with a nationwide rollout planned soon, and it only works if drivers have enabled Record My Ride streaming, which they can turn off anytime.
A homelab operator upgrading to a UniFi UNAS Pro 8, an Intel E610-XT2 10GbE card, and a Minisforum MS-01 miniPC found file transfers crawling at 100-200 Mbps despite all hardware reporting a full 10 gigabit link. After ruling out the NAS, its RAID array, SSD caching, Immich, SMB signing, and Windows Defender, an iperf3 test isolated the problem to networking between the desktop and the MS-01, revealing nearly a million discarded received packets on the Intel adapter. The root cause turned out to be the E610 driver defaulting to 512 receive buffers instead of its supported maximum of 4096.
Security researchers disclosed CVE-2026-82222, a maximum-severity vulnerability in the GiveWP donation plugin affecting versions through 4.16.7.1. By chaining an unauthenticated registration bypass, an insecure PHP unserialize function, and a gadget chain in bundled libraries, attackers can create an account, plant a malicious object in the plugin's session data, and trigger arbitrary command execution on the server by simply loading a front-end page.
AIArion is a website that collects free, ready-to-use ChatGPT prompts aimed at personal development, productivity and workplace skills. Rather than being an AI tool itself, it acts as a prompt library covering frameworks like PAR and CAR resume storytelling, the GROW model, procrastination-beating techniques and salary negotiation scripts.
Security firm VulnCheck discovered three separate backdoor-like implants embedded in firmware made by Shenzhen Zhibotong Electronics (ZBT), whose hardware is resold globally under numerous brand names. The most severe, dubbed ENDLESSDOORS, disguises itself as a Linux kernel process, phones home to a hard-coded command server without authentication or encryption, and grants attackers root-level control over the router. VulnCheck confirmed the flaw is real by hijacking a test router's command channel themselves, and identified it across 20 ZBT-based router models.
Across the US, people who disable or destroy Flock automatic license plate reader towers are being celebrated online rather than condemned, with social media posts backing vandals over police who install the surveillance cameras. In one case an Ohio grand jury declined to indict a man caught on video destroying a Flock camera, and public backlash has pushed some Wisconsin towns to drop their Flock contracts after a neighboring city ended its own.
HP Inc. has entered a patent licensing agreement with Huawei to resolve a legal dispute over Wi-Fi-related intellectual property that Huawei holds. The settlement lets HP continue using the patented Wi-Fi technology in its products without incorporating any Huawei components or hardware. HP clarified the deal is purely a licensing settlement, not a partnership or endorsement of Huawei products, which remain effectively banned from the US market.
An eight-year study published in Neurology found that adults consuming roughly the amount of artificial sweetener contained in one daily diet soda experienced memory and mental sharpness decline 62 percent faster than those consuming far smaller amounts. The research tracked participants over time to compare cognitive changes based on sweetener consumption levels.
An early, unofficial build of Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5 upscaling technology has surfaced through mods, and initial testing suggests it produces worse image quality than expected while cutting gaming performance roughly in half. Testers say the AI-driven rendering ignores the original artistic style of games, producing an over-processed look rather than a faithful enhancement.
CNET's Scott Stein tested the new $225 Pebble Time 2, part of Pebble's relaunch that also includes an upcoming round model. The watch keeps the classic buttons and retro look but adds a touchscreen, color backlit display, heart-rate sensor, and access to a huge library of free legacy Pebble apps and watch faces via a redesigned companion app.