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Walmart CEO John Furner stated in a website post that the company does not and will not set prices based on customer income, shopping history, willingness to pay, or time of day. The statement comes as Walmart expands digital shelf labels, which already operate in 2,300 U.S. stores and are expected to reach all locations within a year.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion, two companies racing to commercialize fusion energy, will have their leaders speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. CFS co-founder Brandon Sorbom and Helion CEO David Kirtley will discuss progress on their respective projects: CFS's SPARC demonstration machine leading to its ARC power plant, and Helion's Orion plant, which aims to deliver 50 megawatts of electricity to Microsoft starting in 2028. CFS has also applied to join the PJM Interconnection wholesale electricity market and raised $1 billion in July, bringing its total funding to $4 billion.
DetectifAI, a San Francisco startup founded by Tarini Padmanabhuni, has built AI models designed to run directly on smartphones to flag AI-generated voices in real time during calls and voice messages. Padmanabhuni started the company after her grandfather was scammed out of money by a deepfake voice impersonating his brother's kidnapping. The company is pitching its software to phone manufacturers to embed detection directly into device operating systems rather than relying on cloud-based analysis.
Android Authority found code in a Google Messages beta build enabling voice notes to start with a single tap on the waveform icon, replacing the current two-step process of tapping and then hitting a microphone icon. The feature is reportedly in limited testing and not yet widely rolled out.
Cyber risk firm UpGuard scanned around 300,000 domains using Supabase and found more than 16,000 databases with misconfigured access controls exposing readable tables. Over half contained personally identifiable information, with smaller subsets exposing plaintext passwords, authentication tokens, and in some cases credit card data. Specific examples cited include a US valet service exposing 100,000+ customer records, a Canadian immigration service leaking 884 plaintext passwords, and an African government consulate exposing 25,000 records.
The FBI has internally declared a 'cyber security incident' after hackers exploiting a vulnerability in an Oracle PeopleSoft server used by its FBIJobs.gov job application portal stole personal data on agents and applicants. Exposed information reportedly includes names, addresses, job titles, Social Security numbers, and medical and psychiatric records. The hacking group ShinyHunters claims to hold data on nearly all FBI personnel and says it is not seeking a ransom but wants a prior FBI report about its activities corrected.
The developer behind Iron Arachne, a procedural heraldry generator, describes moving beyond randomly assembling lions, eagles and crosses to instead encode the rule-based system that governs how heraldic symbols are chosen, described and combined. The write-up compares European heraldry with Japanese mon to show how two traditions solve similar visual-identity problems through very different systems, and explains how those differences shape the generator's design choices.
An engineering guide describes how staff engineers on platform teams—who typically lack product managers, roadmaps, or revenue metrics—can identify what to build next. It categorizes signals into four sources: system-generated signals like crashes and cost data, plus signals from users, the organization, and the broader industry. The piece details methods such as analyzing postmortem patterns and scrutinizing cloud costs and vendor contracts to surface opportunities.
Ahead of its 2026 DevDay event, OpenAI is rumored to be preparing to release a continuously running AI agent called Aeon, aiming to compete with rivals such as Meta's Muse, SpaceX's Grok Bot, OpenClaw, and Instinct. The report notes OpenAI has lagged in the consumer agent race despite demoing agentic features in 2024 and releasing early computer-use and research agents in 2025.
A Virginia Tech graduate student, Hugh Grennan, demonstrated a printable composite made by mixing eutectic gallium-indium liquid metal into uncured PDMS silicone, shown on the 3D Printing Nerd YouTube channel. The mixture forms tiny liquid-metal droplets encased in silicone that stay conductive even after being cut, and when printed on a syringe-fed 3D printer, the droplets can be stretched into elongated shapes that channel heat in a chosen direction.
Farmers and researchers are deploying four-legged robots equipped with thermal sensors, cameras and AI vision models not just to guard high-value crops but to gather detailed data on plant health. Volkswagen has used robotic sheep to study agrivoltaics at a Polish solar farm, illustrating how the technology is spreading beyond simple security patrols.
Southwest Airlines and United Airlines have told Boeing they don't want the latest 737 MAX software installed on incoming jets, after Boeing found a flaw in an automated navigation feature that can misfire when crews abandon a landing and reroute. Neither airline currently has planes flying with the affected software. Boeing notified operators in late August, has launched a formal safety review shared with the FAA, and says it's developing a permanent fix, with an update originally planned for early 2028 that it is now trying to accelerate.