GoKawiil
Tech News
Nothing is accepting applications through October 5 for its Community Review Program, which gives selected fans early hands-on access to unreleased hardware or software. Participants receive a device to test, provide direct feedback to Nothing's team, and must return the product once the review period ends.
A historical researcher describes using Opus 5.5 alongside semantic search over the GLOBALISE archive of Dutch East India Company records to locate what appears to be a previously unidentified 1615 Dutch report describing dodo hunting. The method combined prior specialist knowledge of the exotic animal trade with embedding-based search to surface candidate passages, which the model then read and ranked for human review. The account follows a similar case where a researcher used GPT-6 Astra to break a long-unsolved Napoleonic-era cipher.
An electrical engineer has investigated the long-running science demonstration in which a pickle, when connected to an electric current, emits an orange glow. The researcher's work begins to explain the physical and chemical mechanisms behind the effect, which has puzzled observers for years despite being a familiar classroom trick.
Apple Arcade added five games to its subscription library, which now exceeds 200 titles. The lineup includes Pusheen's Place, a new exclusive life-sim game, alongside ad-free, purchase-free Arcade versions of Terraria+, Touchgrind BMX 2+, and River City Survivors, plus one additional title.
404 Media reports it has viewed a law enforcement training video showing Magnet Forensics' GrayKey Preserve tool and a new Evidence Preservation Mode that can work around Apple's inactivity reboot feature, which normally restarts iPhones after 72 hours of being locked. The video reportedly shows the tools keeping a device in an 'After First Unlock' state even after a reboot, and claims they can also stop automatic deletion of certain cached data like locations, messages and photos.
Coverage highlights warnings that a nano-texture coating on the inner display of Apple's foldable iPhone should not be peeled off, despite some social media users suggesting otherwise. The device, reportedly priced around $2,000, risks damage if this layer is removed.
A developer has published Janus, an open-source single Go binary that runs local .gguf language models on AMD, Intel or Nvidia GPUs via Vulkan, or on CPU, without requiring Python, Docker or Ollama. It exposes an OpenAI-compatible API alongside a built-in web UI with chat, tool-calling, memory and file-handling features, and supports hot-swapping models without restarting.
A developer released Rhun, an open-source code editor built in assembly language, featuring tabs, syntax highlighting, fuzzy search and an optional Vim mode. It integrates running builds, shell commands and AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, supports diff review and committing, and offers 39 light and dark themes.
The Department of Defense is notifying over 2 million current and former service members that hackers accessed personnel data through the Defense Manpower Data Center starting last October. The stolen records included Social Security numbers, names, addresses, sex, race and occupational specialty, affecting 2.8 million living individuals. This follows a separate breach last month in which the ransomware group ShinyHunters claimed to have stolen FBI employee records.
A large-scale measurement study by researchers partnering with Consumer Reports tested 21 late-model vehicles and 30 companion mobile apps to examine privacy practices in the connected-car ecosystem. The study found that 19 of the 21 vehicles transmitted data to at least one third-party domain, including advertisers and trackers, and that seven of the 30 apps sent sensitive identifiers to outside companies.
The Svelte team has shipped SvelteKit 3.0, the latest major version of its application framework. The update includes a new sv migrate command to automate codebase upgrades, moves configuration from svelte.config.js to vite.config.ts, replaces the $lib alias with #lib, and improves environment variable handling, service workers, and error handling.
arXiv announced a rate-limiting policy applying to all submitters and categories, effective October 1, 2026, citing an unsustainable surge in paper submissions. The organization reported September 2024 submissions of 40,363, roughly double the figure from two years earlier, generating nearly 9,000 support tickets for staff and moderators. arXiv said AI tools are helping drive the increase, and moderators are seeing more thin, narrow-scope papers that fail to meet scholarly standards.