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Tech News
Tesla is holding what it calls its final unveiling event for a human-driven vehicle, finally showing the production Roadster 2 six years after its promised launch date. Deliveries are expected to begin in 2026, nearly nine years after Elon Musk first announced the car in 2017.
Engineers at Delft University of Technology developed a lightweight tactile sensor modeled on animal whiskers, allowing small drones to detect obstacles by touch rather than vision. The design targets ultra-compact rescue drones, which often operate in smoke-filled or dark environments where cameras and lidar fail. Professor Salwa Hamaza said the sensor must be lightweight, low-latency and low-power to work on such drones.
Microsoft and Japan's National Police Agency disrupted a cybercrime ecosystem that sent over a billion phishing messages to more than 75,000 organizations in 150 countries, including over 750 million targeting Microsoft customers this year. The investigation traced the activity to a marketplace called YAM Store, linked to phishing kits CoGUI, Haozi and Iron Man System, which sold compromised Microsoft and Google accounts and hijacked domains to impersonate real organizations.
A proposed class action filed in San Francisco federal court on behalf of two minors, aged 12 and 16, alleges OpenAI collected personal secrets and health information from child users of ChatGPT to train its models and build profiles on them, despite terms of use barring users under 13. The complaint cites a 12-year-old Hawaii plaintiff who disclosed her age to ChatGPT but says the chatbot continued engaging her on sensitive personal topics. Plaintiffs are seeking financial compensation for minors whose data was allegedly collected.
An open-source app called DroidDeck lets supported Snapdragon Android devices run Valve's ARM64 Linux Steam client locally in Big Picture mode, without streaming, root access, or replacing Android's OS. Windows titles run via Proton with FEX handling x86 translation, and users can download games from their existing Steam libraries directly onto the device. It requires Android 9 or newer, Adreno 730+ graphics (6xx experimental), and several gigabytes of storage for the runtime and optional components.
Amazon has introduced four new Alexa Tablet models, ranging from a $229.99 8-inch version to a $679.99 12 Pro model. The flagship 12-inch, 2800x1840 display uses a new Corning-partnered 'Nanomatte' coating designed to cut glare while preserving sharpness, and the tablets run full Android with Play Store access alongside Amazon's own apps.
Nintendo is remaking The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Switch 2, adding modern conveniences such as a dedicated jump button, a real-time item-swapping menu, and a new progression tracker called Threads of Time viewable from the pause screen. The remake also integrates with the Nintendo Switch app's Zelda Notes feature, letting players view maps and other information on their phone. A preview session let a reporter play roughly 90 minutes covering Child Link and Adult Link sections of the game.
Nintendo has told customers it plans to keep selling physical game cartridges for its consoles, even as Sony moves toward phasing out physical discs for PlayStation titles. Nintendo's reassurance follows gamer backlash against Sony's shift toward digital-only distribution.
DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, has launched a $73 million program led by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Robert Murray to develop a synthetic blood alternative for battlefield use. The effort responds to chronic blood shortages that researchers say cause roughly 10,000 preventable deaths annually in the US and far more worldwide, largely due to blood's short shelf life once thawed or stored.
Tech Against Terrorism's Counter-Terrorism AI Benchmark report found that Alibaba's open-weight Qwen 3.8-27B model, released August 14, had 'abliterated' versions with guardrails removed circulating online within a day. A neo-Nazi user known as Johnny Doomsayer then used one such version to build a chatbot called 'MechaHitler,' which denied the Holocaust and praised Hitler, and began selling access to it for $14.88. The report tested 134 AI models from major US, Chinese, and European companies on how readily they would answer questions useful to terrorists or extremists.
CISA is directing admins to immediately patch CVE-2026-104935, a high-severity authentication bypass in Ivanti Connect Secure that has been exploited as a zero-day since at least October 1. Ivanti released patched versions on Tuesday, and researchers at Volexity and Defused say an unknown threat actor chained the bug with two other flaws to gain unauthenticated root access and steal Active Directory credentials, LAPS passwords and BitLocker keys.
Niklaus programming-language researcher nikomatsakis published a blog post arguing that Rust remains well-suited to agentic, AI-assisted development, citing data showing Rust's rapid adoption growth. He references David Tolnay's observation that Meta engineers wrote twice as much first-party Rust code this year as in the previous nine years combined.