Ring, Amazon's video doorbell company, has launched its first smart lock, featuring a manual power dial that lets users crank the device back to life if its battery dies. Founder Jamie Siminoff said he developed the feature after worrying about getting locked out of a rarely used vacation home due to a dead battery. The lock also supports entry via fingerprint reader, touchscreen keypad, the Ring app, or Alexa, and its battery is expected to last about a year.
Google launched a public website that lets anyone check whether an image, video, or audio clip was generated using AI, after testing the tool with journalists and researchers since last year's Google I/O. The site uses SynthID, Google's watermarking technology introduced in 2023, and supports a wide range of image, video, and audio file formats. Google says SynthID is already built into Gemini, Nano Banana, Veo, Lyria, and other generative tools, as well as the Gemini app and Chrome browser.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 runs October 13-15 at San Francisco's Moscone West, expecting over 10,000 attendees, 200+ sessions across six stages, and a startup Expo Hall. Online ticket discounts of up to $100 end before doors open, with a 50% second-pass offer and a $75 Expo+ Pass for laid-off attendees. The event includes Startup Battlefield 200, a pitch competition offering a $100,000 prize, with confirmed speakers including Mark Wahlberg, RJ Scaringe, and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA.
eth68 is a new Ethernet-based audio interface for Linux offering 6 balanced inputs and 8 balanced outputs on 1/4 inch TRS connectors, DIN MIDI, and 48/96 kHz sampling via a Burr-Brown PCM3168A codec. It runs custom firmware on an STM32H7 microcontroller emulating a netJACK1 master endpoint, and integrates with JACK via a netone backend or directly with PipeWire through a pw-eth68 client, measuring 3.620ms round-trip latency at 48kHz with a 64-sample buffer.
Chip Ganassi Racing and OpenAI collaborated during the 2026 IndyCar season, with an OpenAI researcher working alongside the team to help optimize car setups for driver Álex Palou, who won his fifth championship in six seasons. The partnership, which included OpenAI branding on Palou's car at some races, is documented in a YouTube series, with a second episode released recently.
Users on X are using AI video and image tools to turn Sam Altman and Dario Amodei into recurring characters, producing fake singing, dancing, acting and HBO-style drama clips built around their real-world rivalry. The trend reimagines the two CEOs' public feuding over AI safety and competition as an ongoing fictional storyline rather than reporting any actual statements from either executive.
Aaron Sorkin's film depicts Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager, as she leaks internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and testifies before Congress, highlighting her efforts to expose platform issues. The movie combines real events with some timeline adjustments, notably placing key moments on January 6, 2021, instead of their actual dates.
Amazon is running a Prime Day lightning deal on the Toshiba M450 Series 43-inch QLED Fire TV, cutting its price from $329.99 to $139.99, a $190 saving. The TV features 4K UHD QLED display with direct-lit LED backlighting, Alexa support, REGZA AI Engine ZR Gen4 processing, and dual Power Audio speakers. Amazon Prime membership is required to access the discount.
Amazon's Prime Day 2026 ran June 23-26 exclusively for Prime members, covering millions of deals across more than 35 categories. AWS published performance metrics from the event, including DynamoDB processing over 59 trillion requests at a peak of 192 million per second, Lambda handling 2.3 trillion daily invocations, and EBS peaking at 24.8 trillion I/O operations.
Noitom Robotics has published HiPHI, a whole-body human motion dataset totaling 617.5 hours captured with optical motion capture accurate to sub-millimeter precision. Of that, 245.7 hours cover human-object interaction with synchronized object trajectories and meshes, and the data is organized using FrameNet, a linguistic framework for categorizing human actions. A white paper from IEEE Spectrum and Wiley describes the dataset and shows reinforcement learning policies trained on it transferring from simulation to a physical humanoid robot.
Microsoft has confirmed that the Surface Laptop Ultra will launch on October 16th, with starting prices at $2,599 for the base model. The device features a 15-inch HDR touchscreen, Nvidia RTX Spark chip, and a range of ports, targeting high-end users in creative, gaming, and AI fields. Higher configurations are available, with the most expensive reaching nearly $6,000.
A Jordanian teenager known as 'Rey,' identified by KrebsOnSecurity as Saif Al-din Khader, was detained and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the ShinyHunters hacking group. The detention occurred while ShinyHunters was extorting a business unit recently spun off from Boeing, and came weeks after Rey took over the group's operations following the arrest of another member in the Netherlands, boasting about breaching an FBI site and extorting the ransomware group Cl0p via an Oracle PeopleSoft vulnerability.
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