Latest Tech News

Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more

Filtered by: tion Clear Filter

Environmentalist Lawsuit Halts Construction of Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

Progress on Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” ground to a halt on Thursday, August 7, when a federal judge ordered a two-week ban on construction. The ruling follows a hearing in a lawsuit by environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians. The plaintiffs—Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Everglades, and the Miccosukee—allege that hasty construction of the facility in the Everglades unlawfully moved forward without public input or an environmental impact st

Lurk – A Turing-complete programming language for ZK-SNARKs

Lurk Overview Lurk is a statically scoped dialect of Lisp, influenced by Scheme and Common Lisp. A reference implementation focused on describing and developing the core language can be found in the lurk-lisp repo. Lurk's distinguishing feature relative to most programming languages is that the correct execution of Lurk programs can be directly proved using SNARKs. The resulting proofs are succinct: they are relatively small, can be verified quickly, and they reveal only the information expli

This Week’s ‘Foundation’ Took a Killer Spy-Fi Turn

Foundation is nearing the halfway point of season three. Episode five, “Where Tyrants Spend Eternity,” began to show us how Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) hopes to gain an advantage over the sinister Mule (Pilou Asbæk). Her plan tapped into a much-loved trope that Star Wars series Andor also made excellent use of: sci-fi spycraft. “Where Tyrants Spend Eternity” is also tense throughout and ends up involving a horrific, large-scale tragedy (another Andor similarity), building to a final scene that t

How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. With the rise of AI writing tools, Wikipedia editors have had to deal with an onslaught of AI-generated content filled with false information and phony citations. Already, the community of Wikipedia volunteers has mobilized to fight back against AI slop, somethi

Why Apple avoiding a big AI acquisition could signal good news

In the midst of Apple’s AI challenges, some have called on the company to dip into its enormous bank account and make a splashy AI acquisition. Here’s why the lack of acquisition could signal something important about Apple’s current AI progress. Apple is ‘open’ to AI acquisitions, but shows no sign of a big purchase It’s been a big week for AI, with major new launches from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Meanwhile, discourse surrounding Apple’s AI efforts remains glum. Last week, the c

New iOS app takes the mystery out of HomeKit troubleshooting

HomeKit, Apple’s smart home framework, is great most of the time, and awfully frustrating when things go wrong. This new iOS app wants to change that. HomeCare for HomeKit HomeCare for HomeKit is designed as a complete toolkit for diagnosing and fixing smart home problems. At its core, it scans your entire setup to instantly identify devices that are unresponsive, slow, or running on low battery. Each failing device shows a “Last Time Online” timestamp to help pinpoint when trouble began. The

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist

The shortlist for the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition has been unveiled. From a blood moon hanging over Shanghai to a family portrait of the Solar System and a close-up of a comet's streaming tails, distant astronomical wonders are photographed in magnificent detail for all to admire. Now in its 17th year, in 2025 the competition received a record number of entries, with just over 5,880 photographs submitted from 68 different countries. See a small selection of shortli

Sony Wants Its Anime Boom to Be as Big as the PlayStation 2

While Sony has been a quietly influential force in the anime landscape—owning studio Aniplex and acquiring Crunchyroll, which absorbed its former rival Funimation to expand its roster of shows and films—the PlayStation maker still sees itself as just getting started. According to a new report, Sony is still building an anime empire, treating this moment like the dawn of the PlayStation era, with more room to grow looming over the horizon. Speaking with the Japanese publication Toyo Keizai (hat-

Instagram’s Map is here, and this is how you can turn your location off

is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. It’s only been a couple of days since the Instagram Map launched, and from the looks of our social feeds, people are not happy about it. Responses have ranged from being mildly annoyed that Instagram is ripping off Snapchat’s Snap Maps instead of offe

Instagram’s Map is here, and this is how you can turn it off

is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. It’s only been a couple of days since the Instagram Map launched, and from the looks of our social feeds, people are not happy about it. Responses have ranged from being mildly annoyed that Instagram is ripping off Snapchat’s Snap Maps instead of offe

How to use Instagram Map and protect your privacy

Following Wednesday’s launch of Instagram’s new Snap Map-like opt-in “Instagram Map” feature — which lets U.S. users share their most recent active location with others and discover location-based content — Instagram head Adam Mosseri is having to reassure people that their location is only visible to others if they decide to share it. Although Meta has made it clear that location sharing is off by default, there have been numerous posts on social media urging users to turn off location sharing,

U.S. Judiciary confirms breach of court electronic records service

The U.S. Federal Judiciary confirms that it suffered a cyberattack on its electronic case management systems hosting confidential court documents and is strengthening cybersecurity measures. The organization stated that, while most documents in the system are public, certain sealed filings contain sensitive information that is now protected with stricter access controls aimed at blocking hackers. "The federal Judiciary is taking additional steps to strengthen protections for sensitive case doc

GPT-5 vs. Sonnet: Complex Agentic Coding

OpenAI released GPT-5 yesterday, promoting it as their best model yet for agentic coding. When it arrived in my GitHub Copilot this morning, I immediately decided to test it with a complex, long-running agentic coding task — and later gave the exact same task to Claude 4 Sonnet 4 for comparison. While this isn't a tightly controlled scientific comparison — more of a "vibe check" — both models impressed me with their results. It's worth noting that while Claude Sonnet has been established for co

What founders need to know before choosing their exit — straight from Jai Das and Roseanne Wincek — at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Startups face more exit options — and more uncertainty — than ever before. That’s why we’re bringing this essential conversation to the Going Public Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27–29 in San Francisco’s Moscone West. Whether you’re already eyeing a liquidity event or just starting to scale, this is your chance to hear what top VCs are looking for and how to set your company up for long-term success. Two of the best in the business — Roseanne Wincek of Renegade Partners an

National Academies to fast-track a new climate assessment

The nation’s premier group of scientific advisers announced Thursday that it will conduct an independent, fast-track review of the latest climate science. It will do so with an eye to weighing in on the Trump administration’s planned repeal of the government’s 2009 determination that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health and the environment. The move by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to self-fund the study is a departure from their typical practice of respond

Turn your AirPods Max into a masterpiece with Casetify’s new headphone wrap

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. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Released as part of a new collection of smartphone, tablet, and earbud cases celebrating the Mauritshuis museum collection in The Hague, Netherlands, Casetify’s new AirPods Max accessory can turn you into a 360-year-old work of art. Made from a “silk-like te

Complex Iterators Are Slow

Complex Iterators are Slow Thursday, 31 July 2025 Timi, my pure JavaScript B-Tree, achieves best in class iteration speed in part because I replaced Iterators with callbacks. They might be convenient, but the design of JavaScript Iterators is inherently slow for complex iteration as it prevents your compiler from inlining code. Inlining is when the call site of a function is replaced with its body to avoid the overhead of a function call. So, this: function add(a, b) { return a + b; } for (

Columbia University data breach impacts nearly 870,000 individuals

​An unknown threat actor has stolen the sensitive personal, financial, and health information of nearly 870,000 Columbia University current and former students and employees after breaching the university's network in May. Established in 1767 as King's College, Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university with a budget of $6.6 billion in 2024, over 20,000 employees, including 4,700 academic staff, and over 35,000 enrolled students across 19 schools and special programs. The

How Attention Sinks Keep Language Models Stable

We discovered why language models catastrophically fail on long conversations: when old tokens are removed to save memory, models produce complete gibberish. We found models dump massive attention onto the first few tokens as "attention sinks"—places to park unused attention since softmax requires weights to sum to 1. Our solution, StreamingLLM, simply keeps these first 4 tokens permanently while sliding the window for everything else, enabling stable processing of 4 million+ tokens instead of j

Window Activation

You click a link in your chat app, your browser with a hundred tabs comes to the front and opens that page. How hard can it be? Well, you probably know by now that Wayland, unlike X, doesn’t let one application force its idiot wishes on everyone else. In order for an application to bring its window to the front, it needs to make use of the XDG Activation protocol. A KWrite window that failed to activate and instead is weeping bitterly for attention in the task bar In essence, an application ca

I don't read your email threads

I Don't Read Your Email Threads 08 Aug, 2025 Email threads have got to be one of the worst possible forms of communication. You've been here before. A perfectly respectable morning is passing by. You're working through your items at a chipper pace maybe humming a song you heard on Spotify that morning. Then, the dreaded email thread comes through. Innocently, you click into the top email. The only text is "[Your Name] see below." I hate this and I bet you do too. Suddenly, you're transporte

Ultrathin business card runs a fluid simulation

This repo contains all files related to the flip-card project, which is a business card that runs a fluid-implicit-particle(FLIP) simulation. The PCB design files are in the "kicad-pcb" folder. The flip-card project is inspired by mitxela's fluid simulation pendant project https://mitxela.com/projects/fluid-pendant The fluid simulation logic is contained in a standalone crate, which is in the "fluid_sim_crate" folder. This is based off the work by Matthias Müller (https://github.com/matthias-r

iOS 26: Friends Can't Decide What to Eat? Here's How to Create a Poll in Messages

Apple released the second public beta of iOS 26 on Aug. 7, and the beta brings a new Liquid Glass design, call screening and more features to the iPhones of developers and beta testers. It also introduced a host of new features to Messages. One of the more useful features is the ability to create a poll in the messaging app. Group chats can be chaotic, and sometimes it feels like only a few people are talking. Creating a poll in a group chat is a nice way to let everyone voice their opinion on

Writing a storage engine for Postgres: An in-memory table access method (2023)

With Postgres 12, released in 2019, it became possible to swap out Postgres's storage engine. This is a feature MySQL has supported for a long time. There are at least 8 different built-in engines you can pick from. MyRocks, MySQL on RocksDB, is another popular third-party distribution. I assume there will be a renaissance of Postgres storage engines. To date, the efforts are nascent. OrioleDB and Citus Columnar are two promising third-party table access methods being actively developed. Why

Age Verification Is Sweeping Gaming. Is It Ready for the Age of AI Fakes?

In July, Siyan, a UK-based Discord user, logged on one morning and found himself unable to access some of his text chats marked NSFW. The channel, a popup informed him, was now age-restricted. The United Kingdom had enacted its far reaching child safety laws, which includes an age requirement system to verify users are over 18. Discord’s updates required users to verify their age, either by government ID or a face scan. Siyan (who requested to only be referred to by his screen name for privacy

Instagram's map feature spurs user backlash over geolocation privacy concerns

The launch of an Instagram feature that details users' geolocation data illicited backlash from social media users on Thursday. Meta debuted the Instagram Map tool on Wednesday, pitching the feature as way to "stay up-to-date with friends" by letting users share their "last active location." The tool is akin to Snapchat's Snap Map feature that lets people see where their friends are posting from. Although Meta said in a blog post that the feature's "location sharing is off unless you opt in,"

I used Perplexity to make a restaurant reservation - now I'm wondering if Google is holding us back

Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images ZDNET's takeaways Perplexity's new feature lets you make a restaurant reservation straight through OpenTable. The feature uses OpenTable's system, so you don't have to trust the AI to do it for you. Instead of navigating between apps or tabs to find a restaurant and then book a table, Perplexity handles everything. Finding the perfect restaurant and making a reservation just got a whole lot easier thanks to a new feature in Perplexity. The chatbot (which ZDNET's

Writing a storage engine for Postgres: an in-memory Table Access Method

With Postgres 12, released in 2019, it became possible to swap out Postgres's storage engine. This is a feature MySQL has supported for a long time. There are at least 8 different built-in engines you can pick from. MyRocks, MySQL on RocksDB, is another popular third-party distribution. I assume there will be a renaissance of Postgres storage engines. To date, the efforts are nascent. OrioleDB and Citus Columnar are two promising third-party table access methods being actively developed. Why

Two teens charged in attack on former DOGE official Edward ‘Big Balls’ Coristine

In Brief Two 15-year-olds have been charged with unarmed carjacking after allegedly attacking Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the 19-year-old software engineer and former Neuralink intern who became a prominent figure in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). According to reports citing local authorities, Coristine — who left DOGE in June but quickly returned to federal service at the Social Security Administration to help improve the agency’s website

Apple Maps cycling directions expand to Hong Kong and Taiwan

When Apple first launched cycling directions on Apple Maps, the feature was limited to a handful of cities like New York and Beijing. Since then, Apple has gradually expanded coverage. Now, cycling directions are also available in Hong Kong and Taiwan. If you ride a bike to get around where you live, you know that some information is essential for route planning: are there bike paths? Bike lanes? Do they cover the entire route? What is the elevation along the way? Since the limited rollout in