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Prepare your iPhone for iOS 26 - 6 things I do before every update

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 26 -- yes, if you've not been keeping up, that's what will come after iOS 18 -- is landing real soon (September 15), and it'll be pushed out to hundreds of millions of compatible iPhones worldwide within a few days. For the most part, the vast majority of these upgrades will be smooth and painless. Also: Every iPhone that can be updated to iOS 26 (and when you can install it) Maybe I'm being overly cautious here, but, as someone who

Topics: 26 apps ios iphone update

You can still buy Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses for $76 off - here are the deals

Jason Hiner/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Meta Ray-Bans have often been very difficult to find in stock at both retailers and online stores for the past two years -- and they rarely go on sale. But one of the best ways to not only get a 20% discount but also find some of the styles that have been discontinued or are rarely ever in stock is to use the little-known Meta Refurbished AI Glasses online store. I recently ordered a pair of Meta Ray-Bans in the Skylar s

I used a $20 AI tool to finish 24 days of coding in 6 hours - but there's a big catch

Aitor Diago/Moment/Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways I spent $20 on Codex and saw 16x productivity. Hard usage limits cut off coding in mid-project unexpectedly. Premium tools can cost $800 monthly but give steadier results. We've talked before about OpenAI's Codex, the AI model designed specifically for programming work. While I found it to have some capabilities, the need to use it only in GitHub or as part of the command-line termin

Topics: ai code codex coding work

Microsoft gives Windows 10 its penultimate update - but saves the best for Windows 11

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways September's Patch Tuesday offers bug fixes for Windows 10 and 11. Windows 11 also received a host of new and improved features. This marks the penultimate Patch Tuesday update for Windows 10. Hey Windows users, it's time once again to install the latest monthly updates on your PC, courtesy of September's Patch Tuesday. Whether you run Windows 11 or are still on Windows 10, you'll find i

Your Android phone's most powerful security feature is hidden and off by default - turn it on now

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

Stability's new AI audio tool creates custom sound for brands - how it works

Tatiana Serebryakova/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Stable Audio 2.5 is designed to help brands build a "sonic identity." The model was trained on a fully licensed dataset. Custom tracks can be used in ads, retail locations, and elsewhere. Stability AI just made it easier for brands to create custom, AI-generated audio, thereby negating the need to spend time and money on elaborate recording and producti

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers

Every day, thousands of researchers race to solve theAI alignment problem. But they struggle to coordinate on the basics, like whether a misaligned superintelligence will seek to destroy humanity, or just enslave and torture us forever. Who, then, aligns the aligners? We do. We are the world's first AI alignment alignment center, working to subsume the countless other AI centers, institutes, labs, initiatives and forums into one final AI center singularity.

Show HN: Making a cross-platform game in Go using WebRTC Datachannels

(The following was adapted from a talk I gave at DWeb Weekend 2025 at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on August 17, 2025) Simplifying WebRTC Datachannels for Games First of all, to get some stuff out of the way, instead of using the “super complicated” WebRTC datachannels, why don’t we use something simpler? Why Not Use Websockets? Too slow : Most games use UDP with a reliability layer on top. : Most games use UDP with a reliability layer on top. Suitable for turn-based games : Fine f

Pulling an Inverse Conway Maneuver at Netflix (2023)

Pulling an Inverse Conway Maneuver at Netflix When I first joined the Netflix Platform team circa 2020, the Observability offering was composed of a series of tools serving different purposes. There was Atlas for metrics, Edgar for distributed tracing, Radar for Logs and Alerts, Lumen for dashboards, Telltale for app health, etc. It was a portfolio of about 20 different apps. Big and small, ranging from business-specific tools to analyze playback sessions to low-level tools for CPU profiling.

The Helix Text Editor

I’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things. I use Rust, despite never having had a professional reason to use it in my life. I switched to Linux in my student years and I’ve never looked back since, even though it constantly breaks and I can’t get my Bluetooth headphones to connect. I have a split keyboard with home row mods set up because I read some random blog posts and it looked cool to me. I literally learned to program because I figured I should learn how to do more n

An engineering history of the Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And most of us probably know that the bomb was built by some of the world’s best physicists, working under Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in New Mexico

CRISPR offers new hope for treating diabetes

Crispr gene-editing technology has demonstrated its revolutionary potential in recent years: It has been used to treat rare diseases, to adapt crops to withstand the extremes of climate change, or even to change the color of a spider’s web. But the greatest hope is that this technology will help find a cure for a global disease, such as diabetes. A new study points in that direction. For the first time, researchers succeeded in implanting Crispr-edited pancreatic cells in a man with type 1 diab

Conway's Game of Life, but musical

A Digital Darwin Adventure with Mating Melodies Hudson Griffith • September 11, 2025 Introduction Music is profoundly human. It runs deep in our lives and shows up in our everyday rituals. And somehow, those rituals often end with us leaving AirPods in the back seat of an Uber. But beneath the everyday habits lies a much older connection. Neuroscience research shows our brains respond to music in fundamental ways that precede language development 1. And what fascinates me is how naturally music

Behind the scenes of Bun Install

Running bun install is fast, very fast. On average, it runs ~7× faster than npm, ~4× faster than pnpm, and ~17× faster than yarn. The difference is especially noticeable in large codebases. What used to take minutes now takes (milli)seconds. These aren't just cherry-picked benchmarks. Bun is fast because it treats package installation as a systems programming problem, not a JavaScript problem. In this post we’ll explore what that means: from minimizing syscalls and caching manifests as binary,

'Robber bees' invade apiarist's shop in attempted honey heist

A Terrace, B.C., beekeeper found herself in a nightmare situation late last month when "thousands and thousands of bees" filled her shop. Call it an attempted robbery — the bees were trying to steal sweet, sweet honey. Christine McDonald, owner of Rushing River Apiaries, said it's the first time desperate "robber bees" — bees that try to take honey from another colony's hive — have descended upon her indoor shop to hunt for food as resources get scarce in the late summer. While she's worked w

Adam (YC W25) Is Hiring to Build the Future of CAD

We’re building the founding engineering team at Adam. At Adam, we’re tackling a frontier problem: building a new way to interface with CAD via AI. This demands creativity, deep technical ability, and novel thinking. As part of the founding engineering team you may: Sprint for two weeks to build a new product vertical from scratch Develop new interfaces for AI-driven CAD workflows Design, implement, test, and deploy full features Work with our product team to ensure a fast, consistent, and

Top model scores may be skewed by Git history leaks in SWE-bench

We've identified multiple loopholes with SWE Bench Verified where agents may look at future repository state (by querying it directly or through a variety of methods), and cases in which future repository state includes either solutions or detailed approaches to solving problems (commit messages and more). Examples: A trajectory with Claude 4 Sonnet, Pytest-dev__pytest-6202 (complete output here), the agent uses git log --all which leaks future commits that directly fix the issue: <antml:para

Topics: coder fix future git log

Neil Druckmann Has High Hopes for ‘The Last of Us’ Season 3

It was a shock to hear that Neil Druckmann, creator of The Last of Us and co-creator of the TV adaptation, was leaving the show after its second season. Many wondered if there was any deeper reason behind the exit, but as Druckmann has since explained, he had been stretching himself so thin over the past few years, he felt it was time to get back strictly to video games. Plus, he was leaving the show in the very good hands of Craig Mazin. The Last of Us would be okay. In a new interview, Druckm

New Study Questions a Major Assumption About the Fall of the Roman Empire

The period after the Roman Empire abandoned Britain has long been known as the “Dark Ages” for a reason. Scholars believed that after the Romans left, local industries collapsed and effectively all progress ceased for centuries. Britain, they theorized, was plunged into a cultural and economic abyss with their departure. But for some time, a growing body of evidence has challenged this narrative. And in a new study published today in the journal Antiquity, researchers investigate the assumption

I Held Apple's Wildly Thin iPhone Air. I'm Both Impressed and Intrigued

Apple debuted its super-slim iPhone Air on Tuesday, and after getting my hands on the device at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, I can confirm it's quite striking to hold. At just 5.6mm thick and 165 grams, it's one of those phones you may just have to feel to understand its appeal. I look forward to finding out if what's on the inside lives up to that show-stopping design. With the iPhone Air in one hand and my iPhone 16 Pro Max in the other, the difference between the two devices is strik

This Secret iPhone Feature Could Improve Your Call Quality

Apple is set to release iOS 26 on Sept. 15, and it will bring call screening and more to your iPhone then. But you don't need the latest iOS update to use Voice Isolation, an iPhone feature that can make your calls clearer for the person you're talking with. Apple introduced Voice Isolation in 2023 with iOS 16.4. The tech company added the feature, alongside Wide Spectrum, to FaceTime calls with iOS 15 in 2021, but only Voice Isolation is available for regular phone calls at this time. When Vo

35 percent of VMware workloads expected to migrate elsewhere by 2028

VMware will lose a significant chunk of business over the next three years, according to Gartner research VP Julia Palmer. Of course, some organizations have already abandoned VMware or are plotting partial or total migrations. Broadcom acquired the virtualization business in November 2023 and made sweeping changes that alienated many customers. The biggest concerns have been higher costs driven by a shift from perpetual licenses to subscriptions and the bundling of products into fewer, more ex

Ted Cruz AI bill could let firms bribe Trump to avoid safety laws, critics warn

Critics are slamming Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Texas) new AI policy framework, which they claim would give the White House unprecedented authority to allow Big Tech companies to make "sweetheart" deals with the Trump administration to void laws designed to protect the public from reckless AI experiments. Under the framework, Cruz calls for a "light-touch" regulatory approach to "advance American leadership" in AI and ensure that "American values" are at the heart of the world's leading technology—not

New black hole merger bolsters Hawking area theorem

Back in 1971, the late physicist Stephen Hawking made an intriguing prediction: The total surface area of a black hole cannot decrease, only increase or remain stable. So if two black holes combine, the newly formed black hole will have a larger surface area. This became known as Hawking's area theorem. Analysis of the gravitational signal from a black hole merger detected in January provides the best observational evidence to date in support of Hawking's theorem, according to a new paper publis

The best e-reader to buy right now

Any ebook reader will let you cram a Beauty and the Beast-sized library’s worth of books in your pocket, but so will your phone. An ebook reader offers a more book-like reading experience, with fewer distractions and less eye strain, and many include extra features, like adjustable frontlighting. Some really are pocketable. Others are waterproof or offer physical page-turning buttons, while a few even let you take notes. I’ve been using ebook readers for nearly a decade, and I’ve gone hands-on

Baseus&#8217; solar-powered dash cam keeps an eye on your parked car for up to two weeks

is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. Baseus has announced a new dash cam that can continue capturing incidents even while your vehicle is turned off. The PrimeTrip VD1 Pro includes both a rechargeable battery and a high-efficiency solar panel it uses to record incidents when motion or impacts are detected for up to 14 days while your car is parked, without draining your vehicle’s ba

NASA found clues of life on Mars, but budget cuts threaten future missions

An exciting discovery on Mars is being overshadowed by turmoil at NASA, with budget cuts threatening to destroy a scientific legacy that has been built over decades. Yesterday, the agency shared a finding, published in Nature, of potential biosignatures identified by the Mars Perseverance rover in a 3.5 billion-year-old rock. “This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars,” said Transportation Secretary and Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy in a press confe

VC leaders from 01 Advisors take the Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 to share the scaling playbook

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, we’re bringing to the Builders Stage three people who helped shape the modern internet. On October 28, Adam Bain, Dick Costolo, and David Fischer — now at 01 Advisors — will sit down for an exclusive fireside chat on what it takes to build, scale, and fund startups in today’s ever-shifting landscape. Before they were backing breakout companies like Tipalti and SpotOn, they were the operators behind some of tech’s most iconic companies. David Fischer — Former CRO at

Justice Department sues Uber for allegedly discriminating against people with disabilities

The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Uber, accusing the ride-hailing company of violating federal law by discriminating against people with physical disabilities. In particular, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) civil rights division claims that the company and its drivers “routinely refuse to serve individuals with disabilities, including individuals who travel with service animals or who use stowable wheelchairs.” Uber is also accused of charging extra fees on riders who n

IEEE Computer Society Announces 2025-2026 Emerging Tech Grant Recipients

Bridging Neuroscience and AI to Transform Brainwaves into Real-Time Multilingual Speech for the Voiceless – This project will explore the development of a non-invasive brain-computer interface system that translates brain signals into multilingual text and speech using advanced electroencephalography (EEG) processing, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and neural text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. It aims to empower individuals with speech impairments through accessible and incl