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Intel has stopped its long-running bug bounty program that paid researchers up to $100,000 per vulnerability, replacing it with a new Intigriti-hosted disclosure process that offers no financial rewards. The bounty board remains visible but is marked as suspended, and Intel has not publicly explained the decision. The program had run since 2017 and accounted for roughly 105 of 231 CVEs Intel patched in 2020.
Programmer Yevhen Kharkivskyi has released Tasks.txt, a free Mac application built around Gina Trapani's todo.txt system. Instead of complex features, it organizes tasks into three simple sections—Next, Backlog, and Done—stored in a single text file and fully operable via keyboard shortcuts.
Samsung's Galaxy Watch9 brings a new Snapdragon Wear Elite processor, Wear OS 7 with customizable widgets, and a raise-to-talk Gemini feature, alongside a modestly larger battery. Despite the bigger battery, real-world battery life stayed around 25 hours with always-on display enabled, similar to its predecessor. The reviewer calls it a solid but incremental update over last year's Watch8, better suited for those upgrading from older Galaxy Watches.
A joint advisory from law enforcement in Japan, the US, Australia and Germany says the North Korean-linked group WaterPlum infected over 30,000 devices across more than 100 countries between December 2025 and July 2026. The hackers drained more than 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets and moved over $10.7 million worth of crypto assets to North Korea, using fake job interviews and malicious code disguised as coding tests or software projects to infect victims.
The FAA is rolling out SMART, an AI tool that analyzes airline schedules, weather, and runway capacity to flag potential conflicts in advance, with an initial deployment in Washington DC's airspace beginning Monday. The project carries a price tag exceeding $875 million, part of a broader Trump administration push to modernize air traffic control following several high-profile aviation incidents.
Researchers continue to push toward superconductors that operate without extreme cooling, a goal that has driven physics research for decades. Despite incremental progress in materials science, truly practical, room-temperature superconductors that could be deployed at scale have not yet been achieved.
An Android Authority writer describes being billed for roaming data twice in three months even though mobile data and roaming were turned off on a rarely used phone connected only to Wi-Fi. The carrier recorded tiny amounts of roaming usage—under 200KB—which triggered a full roaming-day charge, echoing a widely shared case of a Reddit user hit with a $53,000 AT&T bill after a European trip.
Astronomers led by Pablo Santos-Sanz used the James Webb Space Telescope to re-observe a stellar occultation by Chariklo, a small icy body about 250 kilometers wide orbiting between Saturn and Uranus. Compared to the rings first detected in 2013, one of Chariklo's two narrow rings has become denser while the other has nearly disappeared, and the cause remains unclear.
On The Verge's Decoder podcast, former DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter discussed AI companies' requests for antitrust exemptions to jointly coordinate on safety, amid growing alarm from researchers at Anthropic and Google DeepMind who have quit citing unheeded safety risks. Kanter, who led major antitrust actions against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster under Biden, weighed in on whether such exemptions represent legitimate safety collaboration or a bid for regulatory capture and cartel-like behavior.
YouTuber Bits und Bolts repaired a 25-year-old Intel Celeron 1200 (Tualatin) chip that had a missing data pin and destroyed pad, which prevented any system from booting with it installed. By exposing underlying copper layers, applying solder mask, and grafting a donor pin from a separate broken Tualatin chip, the creator restored full function to the CPU. After the repair, the chip was successfully overclocked by 33%.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest consumer price index shows grocery costs climbed 2.7% between August 2025 and August 2026. Over a longer stretch, the same basket of food items now costs 33% more than it did in August 2019, reflecting a sustained multi-year rise in food expenses.
NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster, who publicly alleged OpenAI's Codex used his unpublished work to solve the Navier-Stokes problem before he could, says he continues relying on Codex and Anthropic's Claude for his research despite the dispute. OpenAI investigated the claim and stated Buckmaster's prompts could not have influenced its system or training, while Buckmaster maintains the episode shows AI's growing reach into frontier mathematics.