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Stephen A. Weis says he factored a large RSA challenge number he calls RSA-896 with help from Anthropic's Claude AI model on September 19, 2026. He published the full modulus along with its two prime factors, p and q, as evidence of the result.
Prediction market Polymarket allowed a scheme involving stolen debit cards to proceed despite internal warnings, with CEO Shayne Coplan reportedly dismissing concerns raised about the fraud. The company is now moving to strengthen its executive leadership team as it positions itself for a potential public listing.
A recent technical blog post surveys five software-based approaches for representing numbers beyond standard binary floating point, including decimal floating point (used in Python's decimal and Java's BigDecimal), fraction-based arithmetic, symbolic computation as in Mathematica or sympy, interval arithmetic, and binary-coded decimal. The author notes these methods are implemented purely in software, making them slower than native floating point, and that support varies widely across programming languages.
Cassette tapes, the dominant music format before CDs and streaming, are generally expected to last around 30 years even under ideal conditions, since their magnetic coating gradually loses lubrication and can detach over time. However, actual longevity depends heavily on how tapes were stored, with many well-kept cassettes from the 1970s and 80s still playable today.
A website hosts several hundred paper models of polyhedra, the geometric solids that have long drawn interest from mathematicians and artists. Visitors can browse pictures of the shapes and click through to printable nets that let them assemble the models themselves at no cost.
Apple has released iOS 27 to all users, highlighting more than 30 specific speed improvements across the operating system. These range from photo loading and app launches up to 30% faster, to AirDrop transfers up to 80% faster, plus quicker performance in Safari, Mail, Music, Health, and HomeKit.
DXOMARK's lab and perceptual testing of Apple's iPhone 18 Pro camera system awarded the device 172 points, citing strong dynamic range, improved contrast, accurate skin tones and effective stabilization. The triple 48 MP setup—wide, ultra-wide, and 8x tetraprism telephoto—performed well across photo, zoom, and video tests, with the new variable aperture lens standing out for maintaining sharpness in busy scenes.
Apple's built-in Voice Memos app includes lesser-known features accessible by swiping up during a recording, including pause, rewind-to-replace, and multitrack recording on iPhone 16 Pro and newer. Users can also choose between Mono, Stereo, and Spatial recording modes in Settings, and access transcript copying, trimming, playback speed control, and noise-reduction tools from the recording screen.
Copper-Rs, a Rust-based robotics framework, has introduced a live telemetry system that streams copperlists using forward error correction so a remote 'twin' copy of the robot's software stack can decode, reorder, and self-heal from lossy connections. The twin stack can even jump to recovery points if too much data is lost, ending up running an exact mirror of the robot's live process, which can then be logged or displayed for operators.
Apple's CarPlay Ultra extends the CarPlay experience across every display in a vehicle, taking over instrument functions like the speedometer and fuel gauge and integrating controls such as climate and radio directly into the interface. Despite standard CarPlay running in over 800 vehicle models, Ultra currently only works on select Aston Martin vehicles in the US and Canada, requires an iPhone 12 or newer, and functions wirelessly only.
A new online game challenges players to identify whether displayed images are authentic photographs or AI-generated within a 60-second timed round, giving roughly 10 seconds per image. The format is designed as a quick, gamified test of visual discernment rather than a formal study.
The BBC spoke with multiple current and former employees of OpenAI, Meta and DeepMind who dismissed recent viral warnings that AI could wipe out humanity. The skepticism followed claims by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who suggested future AI agents could develop and deploy biological weapons, sparking a wave of similar warnings from others in the industry.